Ty Burr ’80 is a film critic for the Boston Globe, a member of both the National Society of Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics and a regular guest on various radio programs. Burr studied theater in high school before coming to Dartmouth and getting involved with the film community on campus, which honed his interest in movie critiquing.
Why did you decide to come to Dartmouth?
TB: I decided to come to Dartmouth because of the theater, believe it or not. I went to a school in Massachusetts, where my theater teacher had just graduated from Dartmouth, and he brought our whole class up see a production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” I just was floored by the Hopkins Center and the whole arts community here. I loved New Hampshire and the countryside, and I just really, really was impressed with the arts community.
How were you involved in the arts at Dartmouth?
TB: I was a theater kid in high school. Like a lot of theater kids once they get to college, about a couple of months in you look around and go, “Oh, so those other guys are really good actors. Those are the ones who are actually going to be successful and, okay, I had fun in high school, but I’m going to do something else.” I actually did theater on and off throughout college, and I got very involved in the [Dartmouth] Film Society early on. I ended up actually taking a year off from my studies — what would have been my junior year — and running it. I was basically a College employee running the film society, which is the same as it ever was: 20-odd films in a series per semester. That was my primary involvement with the arts, but it was pretty major. I also wrote movie reviews for The D and editorials and think pieces.
What drew you to film and movie reviews?
TB: I was already into old movies in high school. [Film studies] was a small department, but it was really good. We had a professor named David Thomson, who is a well-known critic and writer. He was like a mentor to me. He taught me how to write about movies and think about movies. I was lucky to get to be among one of the last classes to take a class with a guy named Arthur Mayer, who’d actually been in the film business since the earliest days of the silent. He was teaching a film class, and I mean the guy had lived it. He was telling stories about stuff that he’d been there to see. It wasn’t a big department, but the people who were there were really impressive, and we had this really serious film society that allowed us to program big movies, little movies, foreign movies, American movies, anything. It really deepened my interest in movies and wanting to write about them, and I had the ability in The D to write about them.
Why do you think people should care about film critiques?
TB: I serve a bunch of different functions as movie critic for the Boston Globe. Part of it is just a service play: “Is this movie worth my money? Is it worth taking my kids and dropping 40 bucks on popcorn and all that?” Another large part of what I do is talk about movies within the popular culture and within the greater culture and talk about the work that the director or actors have done before or how it works in the context of the movie world. I give people who’ve already seen the movie something to think about, talk about some of the themes. The basic thing about movies is that everybody has an opinion, and my job is to provide a subjective opinion but do it within an objective context of: what is it about, who did it, what are some of the ideas going on, does it work, does it live up to its best idea of what it wants to do? I try not to grade a cheap horror movie on the same scale as I do “12 Years a Slave” [(2013)]. They’re each trying to do different things.
I’m also trying to write an entertaining read so that people picking up the paper will have a good read. Maybe learn something, maybe be prompted to go see a movie they wouldn’t have otherwise done. At the end of the day, kind of the reason I do the job is to get people to go see stuff they might not have wanted to see, because I think a movie can change your life.
What do you think makes a successful movie?
TB: It realizes what it wants to do and marshals as much craft and technique and artistry as it can to achieve what it sets out to do. If it’s a junky horror movie, is it the best junky horror movie it could possibly be? What I don’t have a lot of patience for is laziness, when I feel like the writers or directors or actors are just going through the motions because there is an audience for it or it is just product.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
