Pitchfork Launches New Film Site The Dissolve

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 11, 2013 9:00PM

We can explain that frantic clicking noise you may have heard if you walked near a film nerd Wednesday morning. That was the sound of eager fingers impatiently refreshing the homepage for The Dissolve, the new film site launched by Pitchfork. The plaintive "come on" which accompanied that racket was an involuntary motor system response to the intolerable persistence of a "Coming Soon" placeholder in the browser tab they had had open to the domain since Pitchfork announced the site in late May.

If you were around for the "YESSSSS, finally" that accompanied the film nerd's triumphant first load of the page in the afternoon, you may already realize that this site is kind of a big deal. Many of the names on the masthead will be familiar to anyone who frequented the The Onion's AV Club in the past decade. Longtime editor Keith Phipps parted ways with the AV Club in December, and has brought along AV Club stalwarts Scott Tobias, Tasha Robinson, Genevieve Koski, Nathan Rabin, and Noel Murray, to go along with other writers such as Sam Adams, Matt Singer and Mike D'Angelo, to new venture The Dissolve. This bodes well for anyone who, like us, has always enjoyed the marriage of intelligent, informed writing and passionate fandom that we found there.

So what is the deal with "Pitchfork, but for movies?" A really, really nice design, for starters, and movie reviews, news, interviews and "commentary that goes beyond gossip and box-office results," as Editor Phipps told Mashable earlier this week:

There's a lot of great film writing on the Internet, but there really wasn't anyone doing what Pitchfork has done for music, which is smart, opinion-driven, critic-driven, review-driven, and written for an audience that was passionate about film but not necessarily coming at it from an academic view.

Like its parent site, The Dissolve will be advertiser-supported, with partnerships in the works. We see AV Club DNA in its array of pithily-named recurring feature segments like Forgotbusters, where Rabin looks at blockbusters that were a little heavy on the "bust" part, and Performance Review, where D'Angelo catalogs great but unheralded performances.

Out of the gate, The Dissolve covers everything in wide release and more, using a five-star system to accompany medium-length (600-1000 words) reviews (check out Rabin's take on Fruitvale Station). The news section has already delivered some interesting nuggets, with Criterion half-off sale recommendations and some good picks for cable viewers looking for movie guidance (although they didn't pick Sharknado?) The Believer-esque portraits portends that, even more than on Pitchfork, the personalities and voices of the writers will be foregrounded.

This will be Pitchfork's highest-profile expansion from its music focus since its 1996 founding (Nothing Major, covering "emerging visual culture", launched in December). Although there are structural parallels between the AV Club and The Dissolve (subordinate to a formerly-Chicago-headquartered media mothership), it's only fair that we get to know this new animal on its own merits, and with as much interesting writing about work already on the table, and the staff happily based here in Chicago, we are eager to do so.