Catholic Film Critics launches

The official web site of the ICFCA hits the presses today. Catholicfilmcritics.com will be the home of our esteemed writers and presenters and your source for what Catholic critics are saying about film.

Here you will find reviews, biographies of our members, and our latest news. In December and January, our awards coverage will take center stage as we present the inaugural Catholic Film Critics Awards for the year’s best films and critics.

Finally, there is one place to go to find, compare, and contrast the top Catholic opinions on films, amassed from around the English-speaking world. Search by film to see what each critic has to say about it. A critic’s page will take you to his or her own archive of reviews.

“That’s one of the biggest treasures here and main reasons we founded the critics’ circle,” said Catholic Film Critics founder, Michael Augsberger. “I love reading great criticism. Before now, if you loved discussing film like I do and wanted to find all the various Catholic critics, you had to scour the web. You might not even know what names to look for. There’s never been a critics’ circle for us in the same vein as the National Society, or the geographically-based ones, or the Women’s.”

Reviews typically are still hosted by critics’ home sites, though some may be hosted by Catholicfilmcritics.com.

“It’s important we do that so as not to siphon traffic from the sites our writers have built,” Augsberger said. “Nor the newspapers and publications they write for. We want them to take the spotlight. We link to them to drive even more readership toward them. It’s the same model that IMDB takes with their reviews. Almost all aggregators of reviews, in fact.”

However, you are not likely to see a score aggregate soon. “The words and the argument are the score,” Augsberger said. “Besides, each critic has a unique scoring system, and we won’t interfere with that.”