ShareThisFour Famous Critics Who Write the Movie Reviews You Love (To Hate)
Film critics hail from many walks of life, but they share a love of movies -- and a love of language. Almost all of the famous film critics you encounter on television or online today began reviewing in print. Here's how four of them made a start.
Roger Ebert
Ebert began his writing career as a high-school sports journalist in Champaign, Illinois. After he studied literature, journalism, and creative writing at the University of Illinois, Ebert began to pen free-lance movie reviews during grad school. The Chicago Sun-Times offered him a trial stint as a movie critic in 1967, and he has been there since.
Leonard Maltin
Maltin was a young film critic, publishing his own journal -- the Film Fan Monthly -- at age 15. He went on to New York University, where he completed a journalism degree. For years, Maltin sold free-lance articles to film magazines, eventually landing regular movie reviews in Variety and TV Guide.
Pauline Kael
Kael, born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, rose to prominence as The New Yorker Magazine film critic from 1967-1991. She failed to graduate from UC Berkeley in the 1950s, but found work as a movie reviewer for radio station KPFA. After freelancing reviews for years, Kael became the film critic at McCalls Magazine, but her rant against the popular Sound of Music got her fired.
Michael Medved
Medved took a circuitous route to movie reviewing. Raised by a defense-contractor father, Medved went to Yale University and Yale Law School. After a short-lived screenwriting career in Hollywood in the 1970s, he began penning conservative political books, which eventually led to a movie reviewing opportunity at CNN.
