The National Society of Film Critics (NSFC) is an American film critic organization. As of December 2007 the NSFC had approximately 60 members who wrote for a variety of weekly and daily newspapers.

National Society of Film Critics was founded in 1966 in the New York City apartment of Saturday Review critic Hollis Alpert, one of several co-founding film critics who was refused membership to the New York Film Critics Circle, as it preferred critics who worked for mainstream newspapers. His co-founders included Pauline Kael, a writer for The New Yorker;Joe Morgenstern, then a movie reviewer for Newsweek; and Richard Schickel, a film critic for Life Magazine. The Society was also founded in order to counteract the influence of New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, who dominated the New York City film critic scene for many years. The original founding film critics, who were overwhelmingly based in New York, called their new group a "national" organization because they wrote for a number of magazines and newspapers with a national circulation.

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups.

Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap.

A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology.

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and published in journals.

Film critics working for newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and online publications, mainly review new releases. The plot summary and description of a film that makes up the majority of any film review can have an important impact on whether people decide to see a film. Poor reviews can doom a film to obscurity and financial loss.

In recent times, the impact reviews have on a film's box office performance and DVD rentals/sales have become a matter for debate. There are those who think modern movie marketing, using pop culture convention appearances and social media along with traditional means of advertising, have become so invasive and well financed that established reviewers with legitimate criticism cannot be heard over the din of popular support. Moreover, this has led, in part, to a decline in the readership of many reviewers for newspapers and other print publications. The vast majority of film critics on television and radio have all but disappeared over the last thirty years, as well. It can be observed that most of the discussion of film on television is focused on the amount of box office business a film does, as if financial success were the only criterion needed to define artistic success. Today arts criticism in general does not hold the same place it once held with the general public.

Christian Charles Philip Bale (born 30 January 1974) is an English actor. Best known for his roles in American films, Bale has starred in both big budget Hollywood films and the smaller projects from independent producers and art houses.

Bale first caught the public eye at the age of 13, when he was cast in the starring role of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987). He played an English boy who is separated from his parents and subsequently finds himself lost in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. He is also notable for his role as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), and for portraying Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and the upcoming finale The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

In 2010, Bale portrayed Dicky Eklund in the biopic The Fighter. He received critical acclaim for his role and won several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.

Paul Anthony Sorvino (born April 13, 1939) is an American actor. He often portrays authority figures on both sides of the law, and is possibly best known for his roles as Paulie Cicero, a portrayal of Paul Vario in the 1990 gangster film Goodfellas and Sgt. Phil Cerreta on the police procedural and legal drama television series Law & Order. He is the father of actress Mira Sorvino.

Sorvino was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Italian American parents Marietta, a homemaker and piano teacher, and Ford Sorvino, a robe factory foreman. He attended Lafayette High School, where he was classmates with painter Peter Max, and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

He began his career as a copywriter in an advertising agency, where he worked with John Margeotes, founder of Margeotes, Fertitta, and Weiss. He took 18 years of voice lessons. While attending The American Musical and Dramatic Academy, he decided to go into the theatre. He made his Broadway debut in the 1964 musical Bajour, and six years later he appeared in his first film, Where's Poppa? He received an avalanche of critical praise for his performance as Phil Romano in Jason Miller's 1972 Broadway play That Championship Season, a role he repeated in the 1982 TCS film version. In a 1974 ABC Movie of the Week, he played Harry Walters, a stout, real estate salesman, who is randomly picked up by a beautiful woman (JoAnna Cameron) and raped at gunpoint as a prank, and left to explain to his friend (Adam Arkin) and wife (Michael Learned) how "It Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Guy", a movie considered risqué, even for the '70s. He also appeared in the 1976 Elliott Gould/Diane Keaton vehicle I Will, I Will...For Now. He has starred in the weekly series We'll Get By (1975, as George Platt), Bert D'Angelo/Superstar (1976, in the title role) and The Oldest Rookie (1987, as Detective Ike Porter). He also directed Wheelbarrow Closers, a 1976 Broadway play by Louis La Russo II, which starred Danny Aiello.