A.O. Scott's main areas of interest are contemporary world cinema and the pratice and philosophy of criticism. He has been a daily movie reviewer for The New York Times since 2000 and is the author of Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth (Penguin 2016). In addition to assessing new films from Hollywood and beyone, he has written extensively on race and gender in modern movies, on changes in film technology and the film industry, on the ethics of children's entertainment and the place of the fan in popular culture. A collection of his film writing, titled What I Thought I Saw, is forthcoming from Penguin. 

Scott became a film critic after failing to become an English professor, and a professor of film criticism a decade and a half later. He received a B.A. from Harvard and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, and was hired as a film critic at the New York Times in 2000. He has always been interested in criticism as an intellectual discipline and a literary form as well as a journalistic craft, and came to Wesleyan to inflict his ideas on the subject on unsuspecting film majors.