HARLAN JACOBSON has covered principally the changing film industry first as a young staffwriter and critic for VARIETY, later as the editor of FILM COMMENT for a decade.
For Variety, he covered the U.S. Antitrust implications of film distribution and exhibition in the 1970s, reviewed dozens of films pre-release, foresaw the Superhero film rise with the first Superman, and bowed out with a front-page banner headline on the color-fading of film stock that threatened the nation’s film heritage (“Old Films Never Die, They Just Fade Away”).
At Film Comment, Jacobson’s cover story interview with Michael Moore (“Michael & Me”) for the film Roger & Me, sparked the U.S. and European press to debate Moore’s misrepresentations of fact in the film, and was widely cited (The New Yorker, The NY Times, and dozens of print and network broadcast organizations) for causing a media rethink of the film and a re-examination of its suitability as an Oscar nomination. It is often assigned reading in journalism schools around the US.
His “Brief Encounters” interview column as Contributing Editor ran for 20 years in Film Comment and included such subjects as Francis Ford Coppola, Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Steve Buscemi, The Coens and Scott Rudin, Frederick Wiseman, Anthony Hopkins, Ridley Scott, Larry David, Sean Penn, Jason Reitman, Mike Leigh, Timothy Spall, Peter Morgan, Robert Duvall, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Sir Ben Kingsley, Robert Zemeckis and more.
Jacobson for 40 years was also a regular outside correspondent for major news media worldwide on film and pop culture. That included extensive coverage of independent film and international festivals from Cannes to Berlin, Havana, Toronto, Telluride and Sundance for major American and European print and broadcast media, such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, CNN, NPR, the CBC and particularly USA Today, where for 20 years he regularly contributed from around the US and world on new films at their debut.
A native of Toledo, Ohio, Jacobson lives in Croton on Hudson, NY. He’s a member of the BROADCAST FILM CRITICS ASSN. (Critics Choice Assn.), FIPRESCI (International Film Critics Assn) and PEN. Following high school at Maumee Valley Country Day School in Maumee, Ohio, he graduated with Honors from Haverford College.
Named film critic in 2010 for WBGO (www.wbgo.org, Jazz Radio 88.3 FM in Newark, NJ), Jacobson covers the international film scene for “The WBGO Journal,” with reports from film festivals around the world about films arriving on the scene in the greater New York metroplex.
Jacobson was the film critic for WFUV 90.7 FM Public Radio in New York for 15 years and served as the Artistic Director of the PHILADELPHIA FILM FESTIVAL.
