Films and utopia: The culture industry revisited

Are film reviewers “critical” intellectuals? To answer this question, I compare the estimations of the “best” films of 1997 provided by three groups of film audiences (film critics; the public; and the Hollywood film industry) with particular attention paid to the preferences of the critics themselves in order to identify the basis, or theory, underlying their aesthetic judgments. The analysis demonstrates that critical film reviews in the tradition of the Frankfurt theorists continue to be written and continue to provide helpful and important insights into the intersection of art, commerce, and the ideological and utopian understandings embedded in these films.