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AboutFilm.
Com is a film site dedicated to reviews, interviews, and community that was active from 1999 to 2006.

Dear Visitor,

It's been 8 years since AboutFilm.Com went on hiatus, and the reality is that, while I may someday return to AboutFilm, it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Nonetheless, I'm enormously proud of what we achieved. In 1998 we didn't exist, my reviews were rudimentary, and my web design skills were terrible. By 2006 I had written 300 reviews, interviews, and features, and many talented other writers had also contributed. We had achieved more than 100,000 page views a month; a community of film lovers thrived on our message boards; and my web design skills were still terrible.

In those years I learned a lot about film criticism, running a website, and editing other writers. I learned that press junkets are populated less by writers interested in the process of making movies than they are by people paid by supermarket checkout-line magazine publishers to assemble sidebars about celebrities' worst summer jobs. I earned a screenwriting degree and came to understand that writing a functional script is much more difficult than I had assumed in my early days of complaining about atrocious straight-to-cable action movies.

Most importantly, I learned that film criticism is inherently subjective. All you can do is express your opinion, explain your opinion as best you can, and hope someone else finds your perspective interesting. Looking back, I regret some of the snarky things I occasionally wrote about an actor, a director, or a writer. Almost everyone goes into the process of making a film with the best of intentions, even a low-grade horror, and there are many reasons why something does or does not work. The exploration of those reasons is what I tried to make my focus as I became more experienced.

Everything ever posted on AboutFilm continues to be available in our index. Someday I might even find the time to put the content into a more attractive template. I continue to grade movies in our Year in Film section, and some of our community still posts on the AboutFilm Forum here.

The pieces listed below are the some of the ones that proved to be our most popular, or at least garnered the most attention. Enjoy.

—Carlo Cavagna, November 2014

(Some of) The Best of AboutFilm
Best of the 1990s
The Best of the 1990s
Do you like lists? Scan through our picks for The Top 100 movies of the 1990s, and then read about The Top 25.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Starring Kier Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Analysis by Dana.
Downfall
Interviews: Bruno Ganz & Oliver Hirschbiegel
The star and director of Downfall talk about the making of Oscar-nominated film, arguing that Germans have a responsibility to address the subject of Hitler and vigorously dismissing criticisms that the film “humanizes” the Führer. Interview by Carlo.
Barton Fink (1991). Starring John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis. Directed by Joel Coen. Review by Jeff.
The Matrix (1999). Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss. Directed by Andy & Larry Wachoski. Review by Carlo.
Dark Blue
Oh, the Inanity!
Dark Blue tackles police corruption and morality amid the Rodney King riots. At the press junket, journalists investigate fashion designers, nudity clauses, and why Kurt doesn't marry Goldie. Feature by Carlo.
The Whole Wide World
The Barbarian: Noted 1930s pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard in film. Includes biography, analysis, and reviews of The Whole Wide World, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, and Kull the Conqueror. Feature article by Carlo.
Browse our complete archive of reviews and analyses!

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