Link to PDF:
UK Monthly Film Review Jan 2023 1.1
In the good old days, there was a monthly summary of new film releases issued by the BFI entitled Monthly Film Bulletin, which looked at all UK cinema releases for the preceding month giving production details, a synopsis, and a review. The publication ceased in 1991, with new film reviews being fully absorbed into the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine. Whilst UK film magazines remain ongoing with Empire, Total Film and Sight & Sound, recently joined by Filmhounds, each new film in these publications is reviewed by a single critic. Online aggregator sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic look to provide a more rounded assessment based on a collection of critics’ reviews, the former now can often stretch into the hundreds of reviews, whilst the latter is more restrictive to sometimes upward of sixty. Both are heavily biased toward American publications and online critics.
My purpose in assembling UK Monthly Film Review has been to capture the key details of each new movie released in the UK alongside a consensus of critical opinion across the best of both UK and US publications and online critics, as well as opinions of the public via IMDb voting. Using this panel I have reviewed the critical analysis and the ratings awarded by each of the critics and converted this into a singular scoring system out of 10, enabling a consensus star rating to be awarded to each new release. The result is, I believe, the most accurate representation of the quality of the new films in release, and therefore a definitive guide for discerning cinema-goers.
The critics’ review panel I have chosen includes:
UK press and trade journals – Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Empire, Filmhounds, Guardian, Independent, Observer, Radio Times, Screen Daily, Sight & Sound, Telegraph, Times, Total Film.
US press and trade journals – Boston Globe, Chicago Reader, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, LA Times, New York Post, New York Times, Observer, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, TV Guide, Variety, Washington Post.
Leading Online Critics: James Berardinelli (reelviews.net), CineVue (cine-vue.com), RogerEbert.com, Film Stories (filmstories.co.uk), Leonard Maltin (Leonard Maltin.com), David Quinlan/Allan Jones (picturesthattalk.com), Dennis Schwartz (dennisschwartzreviews.com), UK Film Review, Derek Winnert (derekwinnert.com).
Included with this post is Volume 1 Number 1 of UK Monthly Film Review in PDF format, for ease of download. The bulletin includes all movies that went into general theatrical release for the first time in the UK during the period 31 December 2022 to 27 January 2023 or debuted on the streaming platform having been released theatrically in other territories.
I will look to continue to produce this bulletin on a monthly basis going forward.