About the Critics.

In the winter of 2009, Daniel Merritt — then a staff writer at Variety covering the indie acquisitions beat — was asked to write a 600-word review of a small Romanian feature for the paper's weekend section. He turned in 4,200 words. The section editor cut it to 600 and ran the piece anyway, then quietly suggested Daniel take his "considerable opinions" elsewhere.

He did. In March 2010, with a $400 annual hosting bill and a borrowed mailing list of forty-three fellow critics, Independent Film Blog published its first review — a 1,900-word essay on a micro-budget drama called Winter's Bone, six months before the film crossed anyone's radar at Sundance. The post received eleven readers that week. Two of them were the film's producers.

The editorial philosophy was set in that first year and has not changed since: no algorithmic surfacing, no sponsored reviews, no listicles for the sake of a headline. Every piece is assigned to a human critic who has watched the film at least twice and spoken to at least two members of its creative team. The average review runs 1,800 words. The masthead, fourteen years on, is still small enough to fit in a single room.

What began as one critic's refusal to write shorter has become the longest-running dedicated indie cinema publication on the web — 12,600+ original articles, reviews, and interviews, dispatched from twenty-two international festivals a year, written by people who treat the job as a craft and the filmmakers as colleagues rather than content.

— D. M., New York, March 2025