James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli (born September 25, 1967)[1] is an American film critic and former engineer. His reviews are mainly published on his blog ReelViews. Approved as a critic by the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, he has published two collections of reviews of movies on DVD and video. He is also a fantasy novelist, publishing a trilogy from 2015 through 2016 known as The Last Whisper of the Gods.
James Berardinelli
September 25, 1967
New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Writer
1992–present
Fantasy
Film
2
Personal life[edit]
Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey.[2] When he was nine, his family moved to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where he attended Cherry Hill High School East.[2][3] Later he moved to Piscataway.[4]
He attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1985 to 1990, obtaining both a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering.[2] After graduating he worked for Bellcore Company, now Telcordia Technologies. He worked during the next 15 years "in a variety of fields, including fiber optics, video testing, and software systems."[2]
Berardinelli has categorized himself as an agnostic and a libertarian.[3] He resides in Mount Laurel, New Jersey with his wife, Sheryl, whom he met through his website.[3][5][6][7] They have two children: a son born in May 2010, and a daughter born in November 2019.[8][9]
Career[edit]
Starting in January 1992, Berardinelli began writing movie reviews, his first being a review of the 1991 drama Grand Canyon.[10] His first review published to the Internet was of the 1992 drama Scent of a Woman, which was posted both to Usenet and his Colossus Inc-hosted[11] website, ReelViews.[12]
Roger Ebert referred to Berardinelli as "the best of the Web-based critics" in 2001,[13] and wrote a foreword for the 2003 book, Reelviews, a collection of Berardinelli's reviews.[14] Berardinelli is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic.[15][16]
In January 2004,[17] he began his blog ReelThoughts, by which time his reviews could attract as many as 100,000 readers,[18] up from around 1,400 weekly readers in 1997.[19] In August 2006,[20] the site moved to ReelViews.net, a domain Berardinelli had originally registered by late 2000.[21]
In September 2013, Berardinelli announced that he had been working on a trilogy of fantasy novels entitled The Last Whisper of the Gods.[22] The first book was published in November 2015, the second was released in January 2016, and the third in March 2016.[23]
Berardinelli appears as a guest on the pop-culture radio program Fictional Frontiers every two weeks.[24]