Never miss a review!

Subscribe to get a once-a-week digest email with links to all new reviews and other new posts at FlickFilosopher.com. Sent on Sunday or early Monday GMT. Always free!

As a free subscriber, you also get:

• teasers, by email and in the Substack app, for new reviews, with links to read them at FlickFilosopher.com, and the full content of some other posts (such as the weekly Loaded Question discussion prompt)

• a daily streaming recommendation in your in-box and/or the app (truncated versions appear on my social media).

What you get with a paid subscription…

As a paid subscriber, you also get:

• new reviews and some other posts in their entirety delivered directly to your email in-box and the Substack app (these reviews and posts are free for all to read at Flick Filosopher)

Most importantly, as a paid subscriber, you are directly contributing to one of the longest-running film criticism efforts on the Internet (since 1997).

FlickFilosopher.com accepts no ads, sponsored posts, or other bullshit that makes too much of the Web unusable and skews search results. Please help me keep it that way.

(All the same premium stuff shows up on my Patreon, so if you’re more comfortable with that platform, head over there to support my work.)

The weekly email digest newsletter will always be free!

(I also have a Substack for my fiction, which you can learn more about here.)

Who am I?

I’m MaryAnn Johanson, a pioneering Internet film critic from New York City now living in London. I started FlickFilosopher.com in 1997 — it began in the free web space that AOL gave its members, but soon outgrew that — and it’s now one of the longest-running continually updated film-criticism sites online… and a highly respected and popular one, at that.

But I’m not just some loudmouth with a blog! Before the plague year of 2020, my reviews were syndicated across a variety of US alt-weekly newspapers. (The coronavirus pandemic hit those papers hard, and many had to suspend publication.) My writing on film has also appeared at such sites as Indiewire, PBS’s Independent Lens blog, Film Threat, and Film4.com. I regularly appear on the BBC World Service’s “The Arts Hour” as a cultural commentator, and I’ve served as a jury member at Sheffield Doc/Fest, Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, and Edinburgh Film Festival.

I’m an executive member of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (which awards the Webbys), one of only a few film critics among the organization, which honors innovation and creativity online.

I’m a Tomatometer critic at Rotten Tomatoes — my reviews contribute to a movie’s Freshness rating there — and I’m a Top Critic at the Movie Review Query Engine. I’m a member of the Online Film Critics Society as well as the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. (Get a comprehensive rundown of my credits and experience here.)

I take movies very seriously — I believe they are vital expressions of our culture, at its best, worst, and everything in between — but I also have a lot of fun with them.

Here I am trying to pick up Thor’s hammer at an Avengers exhibit in London:

And here’s me with Emmet Brickowski at a Lego Movie screening:

Please come along on this wild journey with me!