WELCOME
A blog on movies & TV, Hollywood and beyond. I studied film at Halmstad University and practical filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. That’s when I played an innocent Wall Street tycoon whose wife and children were kidnapped by an Albanian mobster. We had fun. Check out Artur Warchavchik’s student film on YouTube.
Now I’m a critic for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. Opinions expressed on this personal website are solely mine and not related to Aftonbladet.
How this website works
These are sort of my archives. The first time I started writing short reviews of the films I saw, I was 16. When I found Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide in my local bookstore I realized that I wanted to do something along those lines. Then came the Internet and what would eventually become this latest version of my website saw many different early iterations. The Movie Guide was doomed as a commercial project because of the Internet, but making money off of this has never been a primary ambition.
A few words on the structure of my reviews.
Every time I watch a movie I make a decision: do I write just a few words on what I’ve seen, or is this particular film worth writing about at length? Most times I’ll settle for a capsule review, but it’s not like that will be enough for a film like, say, Citizen Kane (1941).
Since I am Swedish, a smaller part of the website features reviews in Swedish. This section is for films made in Sweden that have basically no international audience. This has changed a lot over the years, as foreign-language films have become more widely accessible, not least thanks to Netflix.
The year of premiere is traditionally when a film or a TV series were first shown in theaters, on a streaming service or on a network. I don’t use film festivals as a year of premiere, unless it is a movie that never got a distribution deal.
As for grades, movies made primarily for theaters, video on demand (VOD) or released straight to cable, video, DVD or Blu-ray receive a star rating from 1 to 5. This also applies to films that were originally made for a theatrical premiere but then sold to streaming services. The concept of VOD includes Netflix, etc.
TV movies and series made for broadcast and cable networks, including streaming services, are graded this way:
ABOVE AVERAGE
AVERAGE
BELOW AVERAGE
Why not use stars for television as well, you might ask? I simply borrowed Maltin’s system and has continued using it because I think the separation between films and TV serves a purpose, and TV series in particular are not easily summed up using stars; I’m more comfortable with a blunter tool in that case. That said, there are many instances where it’s hard to tell these days what separates a TV movie from a regular one. But if its premiere is on a network, broadcast or cable, rather than in theaters or a streaming service, it is traditionally considered to be made for television.
My last word section in a review is a place where someone involved with the making of a film or series says something interesting about it. I always link to the website where I found the quote.
I’m on Letterboxd, and there are a few other familiar options: