Joe Baltake

Who is Joe Baltake?

Joe Baltake is an American movie critic and film historian, as well as author of the film site, The Passionate Moviegoer and a biographer of the actor Jack Lemmon. His work has been syndicated by Knight-Ridder, Scripps Howard News Service and the McClatchy wire services.

Baltake's film reviewing career started at Gannett's suburban newspaper group, where his critiques appeared in several New Jersey-based newspapers, and continued at Knight-Ridder's The Philadelphia Daily News and McClatchy's The Sacramento Bee. He was the first-string film critic at both dailies. In all, he estimates that he has professionally reviewed about 7,000 films throughout his career. He has contributed articles on film to The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Us magazine, "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives" and Films in Review, among others, and his most recent reviews are posted on Rotten Tomatoes.

Film books he has written or edited include The Films of Jack Lemmon and its update, Jack Lemmon: His Films and Career, published in 1977 and 1986, respectively, in the United States by Citadel Press and in Canada and Great Britain by Columbus Books. He was also an associate editor of John Willis' Screen World, an annual film anthology from 1973 to 1993, when the anthology was published by Crown Books, and wrote the afterword for "The Films of Burt Reynolds" by Nancy Streebeck, published in 1982 by Citadel Press.