Variety rubbishes the UK movie blog scene as virtually non-existent - the perfect space in which professional media outfits can thrive, it suggests. Specifically, the mag says, whilst US amateur critics and newshounds like Ain’t It Cool News’ Harry Knowles (pictured) have garnered significant web traffic, “the rise of the common blogger is hampered in Europe by limited access to the industry” because no-one is feeding out the insider chatter.

So movie blogs are mostly operated by bigger players like French magazine Telerama (“our film blogs tend to fall into the ‘internet trash’ category because it’s always easier to give random opinions than relevant information”), German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (“independent blogs represent a potential competition, so we respond by having our own blog”) and The Guardian (“blog culture hasn’t grown past the stage of the fan-in-bedroom type of blog”). Anyone care to point Variety to any good movie fan blogs… ?

(Photo: Peter Verrant, some rights reserved)