Lisa Schwarzbaum (born July 5, 1952) is an Americanfilm critic. She joinedEntertainment Weekly as a senior writer in 1991, working as a film critic for the magazine alongsideOwen Gleiberman from 1995 to 2013.^[2]

Lisa Schwarzbaum was born on July 5, 1952, to Leon Schwarzbaum, a combat engineer during thePacific War. The oldest child of a Jewish family raised in the Bronx, she has two brothers.^[3]

Schwarzbaum has creditedWWOR-TV'sMillion Dollar Movie series for sparking her interest in films through its presentation ofRKO Pictures' catalog. After concentrating in music atSarah Lawrence College, her mother suggested that she become anart critic to combine her interest in writing. Lisa Schwarzbaum's early work underLeo Lerman in the arts and entertainment section ofMademoiselle further shaped her career as a film critic.^[1]

Schwarzbaum's writing career began with reviewing classical music forThe Real Paper andThe Boston Globe.^[4] Aside from her work as a film critic forEntertainment Weekly from 1995 to 2013, she has also written forThe New York Times,Time,Slate,The New Statesman andThe Baltimore Sun.^[5][6][7][8] She is a member of theNational Society of Film Critics, is a past president of theNew York Film Critics Circle, and has served a five-year term on the New York Film Festival's selection committee.^[9]

FollowingGene Siskel's 1999 death, Schwarzbaum served as a guest co-host for an episode of Season 14 ofRoger Ebert & the Movies.^[1] She appeared on a February 2004 episode ofWho Wants to Be a Super Millionaire as part of the first "Three Wise Men" panel to support the wrong answer option.^[10] She had multiple appearances onCharlie Rose to discuss recent movie releases.^[11]

Schwarzbaum is featured in the 2009 documentaryFor the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism describing the importance and impact of two women critics,Molly Haskell andJanet Maslin.^[12]

In early 2015, Schwarzbaum was selected forAmtrak's inaugural writing residency program, in which she produced blog posts on her cross-country travel and wrote about her father forTablet.^[3][13]

In her final column forEntertainment Weekly in 2013, she wrote:

I've spent 22 years atEntertainment Weekly, 19 of them as a critic—a glorious tenure that ends this week. [...] I once received an effing cool email fromJosh 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 [...] (my plans include a book, an online project, speaking engagements about popular culture—oh, and a dog!)^[2]

• Lisa Schwarzbaum atIMDb

• 1952 births
• Living people
• American film critics
• Time (magazine) people
• American women film critics
• 20th-century American women journalists
• Journalists from New York City
• People from Queens, New York
• 20th-century American journalists
• 20th-century American women writers
• 21st-century American journalists
• 21st-century American women journalists
• 21st-century American women writers

• CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata