This research examines the aesthetic elements of contemporary film criticism. Although a restricted field of film production has arisen beside the large-scale field, including an elite critical discourse, the film industry remains relentlessly oriented to its goal of producing commercial products that achieve widespread popular appeal. This differentiation becomes apparent in the types of films validated by publics, peers, and critics. Our exploratory analysis examines whether the dichotomy of artistic versus popular forms of criticism still captures the complexity of films produced under conditions of increased commercialization, globalization, and digitization. We analyzed reviews published in newspapers of record in the United Kingdom and United States of films released in 2007 that received the utmost popular, professional, and critical recognition. Findings reveal that contemporary film criticism incorporates aesthetic elements drawn from popular interests as well as elite art considerations, thereby complicating critics' aesthetic systems and analysts' classificatory schemes.

Today's complex film world seems to upset the dual structure corresponding with Bourdieu's categorization of 'restricted' and 'large-scale' fields of cultural production. This article examines how movies in French, Dutch, American and British film fields are classified in terms of material practices and symbolic affordances. It explores how popular, professional, and critical recognition are related to film production as well as interpretation. Analysis of the most successful film titles of 2007 offers insight into the film field's differentiation. Distinction between mainstream and artistic film shows a gradual rather than a dichotomous positioning that spans between conventionality and innovation. Apparently, the intertwining of small-scale and large-scale film fields cannot be perceived as straightforward loss of distinction or an overall shift of production logics, but rather as 'production on the boundaries' in which filmmakers combine production logics to cater to publics with various levels of aesthetic fluency and omnivorous taste patterns.

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Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to a growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention does not necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists' attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film's prominence in the press does not seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but rather a revaluation of a popular cultural form.

paranormal the book maps out the range of ways in which commercial media factors help to shape the broader cultural context of how people engage with the paranormal, but also, crucially, the manner in which that audience itself shapes and constructs their own beliefs and experiences through what they also bring to a range of cultural practices.Thus, while the media, for example reality television shows, become a 'resource for identity work in the maintenance of paranormal beliefs and disbeliefs' (p. 88), Hill demonstrates the ways in which the audience, with a growing sense of media literacy, are active participants in this complex and often contradictory process. The paradox of extraordinary beliefs being transformed by commercial media into ordinary media events is well captured in the book, as is the manner through which sections of the audience reconcile this paradox with their own practice, media consumption and beliefs.A couple of other issues are worth noting. Given the scale of the ground covered there will always be areas less developed. The political economy of the paranormal industries is worthy of further analysis, in particular the manner in which social media and a more commercially orientated media system is shaping the range of cultural practice being produced. The section on the importance of the audience as part of the event also offered parallels with live sporting audiences and the embedded nature of their positioning as part of the event, not as extras but as part of the show itself.Throughout the book, Hill is never judgemental about her audience; thankfully, however, this is not to say this is a book without judgements and insightful comment. Hill does not set out to judge the values of the range of audiences engaged in paranormal culture, rather, as an ethnographer she wants to understand their practices and the extent to which the paranormal has moved into mainstream popular culture. She does this by setting the process against a backdrop of the rise in spiritual beliefs in society. In that sense she echoes Raymond Williams's assertions about the manner in which culture is made and remade in the everyday and the ordinary. To this end the book offers an insightful, comprehensive and engaging investigation into the ways in which cultural practices operate at the everyday level in the construction of identities, both individual and collective. In so doing, Hill's highly readable book shines a perceptive light on an area of mainstream popular culture that has been surprisingly under-researched for too long in media and communications studies.