Kamran Jawaid

Who is Kamran Jawaid?

Kamran Jawaid, full name Mohammad Kamran Jawaid, born April 29, 1982, is a film critic from Karachi, Pakistan known for his stylized film reviews. He is also a self-taught filmmaker.

Jawaid is considered one of Pakistan’s most cerebral and well known film critics. His journalistic style often has a delicate balance between academic film essays and commercial reviews. Often his reviews deliberate on technical insights and large paragraphs emphasizing specific scenes within the movie, and not the story itself. Most of his smaller reviews go without revealing much of the film's story, except the pitch. Instead of an expanded synopsis, his reviews often deliberate over the director’s vision.

In his reviews he often quotes other film critics. His most quoted critics are A.O. Scott and Roger Ebert. He also cites A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, Elvis Mitchell, J.Hoberman and Mick LaSalle as major influences in his work.

Jawaid has a dedicated weekly film review column titled Animadversion, which has a second smaller review by fellow film critic Farheen Jawaid under the title of Second Opinion. Together Kamran Jawaid and Farheen Jawaid do exclusive yearly Oscar Predictions for Images on Sunday magazine.

Images on Sunday, formerly just Images, is a weekly publication which runs every Sunday in Dawn Newspaper, Pakistan's leading English language daily, a publication of Pakistan Herald Group, a publishing giant from Pakistan.

Kamran Jawaid also appeared on the hyped morning show Bakhabar Savera for ARY News in 2009 as a Media Analyst. In the show he was called MKJ, which is short for Mohammad Kamran Jawaid. As MKJ his segment was titled Khabar Bakhabar and ran thrice a week. The segment was rose to fame because the show's host Sana Tariq and Jawaid fiercely disagreed with each others opinion. MKJ's segment ran to over 80 episodes until the morning show ended in August 2009.

Apart from film criticism Kamran Jawaid also runs a motion picture production and media consulting company by the name of Kamran Jawaid Productions.