Lisa Schwarzbaum

Who is Lisa Schwarzbaum?

Lisa Schwarzbaum is an American film critic. She joined Entertainment Weekly as a film critic in the 1990s, and remained there until February 2013.

She has been featured on CNN, co-host on Siskel & Ebert At the Movies as well as a cultural, theater and television reviewer.

Schwarzbaum is featured in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism describing the importance and impact of two women critics, Molly Haskell and Janet Maslin, and also recalling the effect on her as a child watching the Joseph Losey film, The Boy with Green Hair. The films shows that Schwarzbaum played viola and started out writing about music.

Her career began in Boston, where she wrote for The Boston Globe. She has also written for The New York Daily News The New York Times Magazine, Vogue and Redbook. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.

In her final column for Entertainment Weekly, she wrote,

I've spent 22 years at Entertainment Weekly, 19 of them as a critic—a glorious tenure that ends with this issue. . . . I once received an effing cool email from Josh Brolin telling me, and I quote, "You can f---ing write!" and promising to be in my movie. Not that I have any plans whatsoever to write a screenplay...