Film critic Rex Reed is not having fun.

Serving on the jury for Bermuda's fifth International Film Festival (BIFF) is hard work especially when the movies have to compete against the sand and the sea - and often meals.

“We're living on popcorn,” he told The Royal Gazette.

Mr. Reed is sharing BIFF jury duties with actress Martha Plimpton and internet writer David Poland.

The trio are charged with rating the 12 feature films competing in BIFF this year while Bermudian videographer Peter Backeberg and Monteith McCollum, the writer-director of last year's winning documentary ‘Hybrid' and judging the competing shorts and documentaries.

Mr. Reed is no stranger to the art of movie criticism, however - he's been at it since the 1960s and now works as the film reviewer for the weekly New York Observer.

He is also the author of eight books about movies and one novel.

While he's served on juries previously at festivals in Montreal, Venice and Berlin, this is his first time at BIFF.

While he'd not seen all the competing films when he spoke with The Royal Gazette on Monday, Mr. Reed said he's concerned about the quality of films in the festival.

“Generally the quality is quite low,” he said. “I would like to see better films but I am also aware of the problems the organisers are experiencing in attracting films to the festival because it is so new.”

The timing of BIFF is also a problem, he explains, as it falls so close to the Cannes Film Festival in May.

“Every country wants their films to show at Cannes and they can't show at Cannes if they've been screened anywhere before that,” Mr. Reed said.

“So, it's a problem because even those films that haven't been accepted to Cannes are still hoping to be.”

Rescheduling the festival so that it runs after Cannes would go a long way to attracting better films, he suggests.

While he'd not had the opportunity to see Errol Williams' documentary ‘When Voices Rise' or most of the Bermudians shorts competing, Mr. Reed did enjoy Elizabeth Mulderig's short ‘Royal Flush'.

“I think I liked it the best of the shorts I've seen,” he said.

For Mr. Reed, however, the golden era of Hollywood is long past.

“By the time I got to do what I really wanted to do, the movie industry had collapsed,” he said. “Movies are not what they used to be and there are no real movie stars anymore. I had trouble filling my ten best list last year.”

Meanwhile the plethora of bad films kicking around can be quite demoralising when you job is to watch roughly 20 of them a week.

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