This study deals primarily with recent academically oriented critical material, but it also embraces the range of film criticism that has been written for the mass audience in newspapers and periodicals. The study considers eight types of critical approaches to analyzing film: the journalistic approach, which contains both a reportorial-review and an evaluative function; the genre approach, which describes the elements that constitute different film types; the behavioral approach, which discusses the psychological, sociological, or anthropological methods; the theoretical approach, which examines the seven different types of theories for making a film; the history and biography approach, which is adapted from literary criticism; the oeuvre approach, which explores a critical approach in which the critic examines all of a director's films; the personal approach, which relies on studies examining the film maker's private life to develop a critique of the work; and the structural approach, which analyzes the thematic motifs and the technical and aesthetic structural elements of a film. (Author/RB)