Picture of the word movies

A film is an artistic attempt to explore a subject or topic that usually reaches far beyond itself whereas a movie is designed purely to entertain and deliver precisely what an audience expects of it.

Today we’re going to explore the difference between film and movie in extensive detail, or that is to say, we’re going to look very closely at the meaning of the two words. This might seem like a slightly confusing subject at first, especially when you’re likely to hear both of these words getting used as part of very similar sentences. But there are definitely some key areas that set movie vs film apart.

We’ll give you a detailed rundown of the exact definition of each word and provide you with a quick reference table so that you can come back here at any point for a fast “refresher” on the film and movie difference. Let’s dive further into the film vs movie debate and try to make a little more sense of it all!

Definition of Film – What Does Film Mean?

The definition of film is, “Any story or event that has been recorded by a cameraman as a series of moving images that is shown on a television or in a cinema.”

So, when we watch something on our television or at the cinema, what we’re seeing is a series of pictures that have been combined together at high speed and placed onto a physical piece of film. This gives the illusion of “motion” (hence the description “motion picture”).

Film is the name of the material that the moving images are placed onto. Before we look further into the word itself, first consider another definition that we can use to set film vs movie apart: “A flexible piece of plastic, or other material, specially coated for exposure in a camera. Used to produce photographs or motion pictures.”

As you can see, when we say “film,” we’re describing a tool as opposed to a piece of entertainment or genre. This tool (a plastic film) is used to create something that we see on our screen. A “film” isn’t a “movie,” though many believe it is.

When we consider the technical definition of the word film, it relates to something extremely specific. As we’ll soon cover, the word movie is a very “open-ended” word that can have several meanings. Film, on the other hand, is a very factual and precise word that only has one direct meaning.

Those working in the film industry or those who write about the film industry typically prefer to use the word “film” when they talk about a motion picture. This is because it is considered to have a more “professional” sound and meaning than the word “movie.”

Given that the definition and use of the word film is intended to be both professional and precise, it probably comes as no surprise that it is often closely linked with motion pictures that are designed to be factual in nature (like a biography) or that carry an educational or “deep” message (think of a high calibre drama like the film “Good Will Hunting”).

Before we take a look at the word movie and consider how movie vs film vary further from one another, you might find it easier to sum up the difference between movie and film at this stage with the simple phrase that one word (film) is “serious” and one (movie) is “fun.”

Definition of Movie – What Does Movie Mean?

The definition of movie is, “A film shown either on a television or in a cinema that is designed to tell a story and entertain.”

Movie is a word used to describe a popular type of film that is often of a commercial or “fun” nature.

Though it’s very easy to understand why people use the movie vs film interchangeably as though they are exactly the same, after reading the last section, you already know that the word “film” is typically used to describe certain motion picture types, and it’s usually used mainly by industry professionals.

So, if that’s the case, what is the exact film and movie difference? To decipher their variations further, let’s first consider another commonly accepted alternative definition for movie: “Motion pictures as a genre of art or entertainment.”

And it’s this second definition that gives us our primary difference between movie and film. A film produced mainly for the cinema for entertainment purposes is typically referred to as a movie.

In a way, a film is a format used to create something. It is little like a canvas is used to paint a picture. However, a movie is something that has been created using that canvas. In this instance, the canvas is a film. This is the primary movie and film difference.

Another movie and film difference is that those working in the film industry typically use the word to help establish the serious nature of a motion picture, the word movie is often used by those outside of the industry (movie goers and cinema fans) to describe films that have been created purely for entertainment.

The difference between film and movie is very subtle, but professionals like to use the word film to make people aware that what they’re watching is supposed to be taken seriously and to an extent, they would probably prefer that their motion picture was referred to as a film accordingly if its tone is serious or touches on a delicate or meaningful subject.

However, the general population, and even some film directors themselves, use “movie” to make you aware that their film has been made purely “for fun.”

Movies are associated with being produced as a means of making money by entertaining millions of people either in the cinema or at home. Films, on the other hand, are usually designed to educate you or make you think. That’s typically their primary objective.

One is an artistic statement and one is a piece of entertainment. Or at least, that’s probably how professional actors and film directors would like you to view their work if they use either of the two words!

In reality, a film can be entertaining and a movie can be educational. But it’s the way you think about a motion picture before watching it depending on which word is used that’s supposed to help you to understand more about its nature.

What Is Main the Difference Between Movie and Film?

We’ve created a quick reference table to make it easier for you to understand the difference between film and movie without having to read the entire article every time you come back for help.

Though the two can certainly cross over from time to time, the above differences typically remain consistent.

We’re now going to provide you with an FAQ to separate the film movie difference further so that by the time you’ve read through to the end of our post today, you’ll have every question about these two motion picture formats thoroughly answered.

Film and Movie Difference – FAQ

Here are the most commonly asked questions about movies vs films.

Can you tell me the difference between a film and a movie from a directors perspective?

A director who has created a serious motion picture that touches on sensitive, meaningful subjects will likely refer to their motion picture as a film and would probably like their audience to do the same.

If a director has created a motion picture purely to entertain audiences without there being much deep or intricate thought required, however, it’s likely that they will refer to their motion picture as a movie instead.

So, what is the difference between film and movie at the cinema?

A movie has usually been designed to generate as much cinema and home video sale revenue as possible purely through entertaining mass audiences, whereas a film is used to explore meaningful subjects and isn’t likely to appeal to as many people or generate as much revenue as a movie.

Can you sum up the movie film difference in one word?

If you wanted to use one word to describe a movie or film, then a movie would be described as “fun” and a film would be described as “serious.”

So What Is Film and Movie? – Conclusion

Finally, for those who came here today pondering over the question, “What is the difference between movie and film?” You should now be equipped with everything you need to effectively summarize and separate them.

Though the two words absolutely can and do get used as part of very similar sentences, in summary, their intended use and how their intended use is supposed to change your outlook on a motion picture are very different.

Don’t forget, any time you find yourself at a loss, take a quick look at the table in the last section and remember: “A film usually requires a lot of thought to understand, whereas a movie often requires very little to enjoy.” And with that, it’s time for you to go and enjoy your next blockbuster!

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Words and Pictures
Theatrical film poster
Directed by	Fred Schepisi
Written by	Gerald Di Pego
Produced by	Curtis Burch Gerald Di Pego
Starring	Clive Owen Juliette Binoche Keegan Connor Tracy
Cinematography	Ian Baker
Edited by	Peter Honess
Music by	Paul Grabowsky
Distributed by	Roadside Attractions
Release dates	September 7, 2013 (TIFF) May 23, 2014 (US)
Running time	111 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$3.3 million[1]

Words and Pictures is a 2013 American drama film directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, and Keegan Connor Tracy. It was screened in the Gala Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.^[2][3]

Plot[edit]

Croyden is an upscale college preparatory school in Maine that hires teachers for their advanced courses who are accomplished professionals.

Jack Marcus is a writer and poet who teaches the advanced writing class. He’s a good teacher who inspires his students. He demonstrates how some carefully chosen words and phrases can stimulate the listener’s imagination to produce vivid mental imagery. One particular grievance of his involves the way in which young developing minds have been hijacked by the tedious distractions of modern technical gadgetry. He seems to be afflicted with writer’s block and hasn’t come out with any original work in several years. He publishes the school’s literary magazine, which the school administration is planning to shut down for budgetary reasons. He is a high-functioning alcoholic who chronically arrives late to work and is on the verge of being fired. He is divorced and has an adult son from his first marriage, but they have become estranged because of Jack’s drinking and general irresponsibility.

Dina Delsanto is an artist who has just been hired to teach the advanced art class, which has the same students as Jack’s writing class. Dina was a successful painter in New York City, but she now has difficulty painting or even walking and engaging in daily activities because of severe rheumatoid arthritis. She can no longer fasten buttons, open medicine bottles or hold paint brushes. She moved to Maine, where her sister and her mother live, so that they can help her during the spells when her arthritis worsens. As a teacher, she is a perfectionist with no interest in her students’ personal lives. She simply wants them to concentrate on creating the best works of art that they can. She shows them the difference between paintings that merely demonstrate craft and paintings that evoke feeling as well. She struggles to paint again by overcoming her physical limitations as well as her own artistic difficulties. She finally creates a good work of art and sets it aside to dry. She has, incidentally, professed a complete disdain for the spoken and printed word. She insists that artistically rendered images are the only worthwhile media for expressing «truth».

Jack’s colleagues and friends perceive him as attention-getting, obnoxious and charming. Once he gets wind of Dina’s personal philosophy, he provokes an argument with her over which is more important, words or pictures. Their students are drawn into the conflict with class assignments demonstrating the superiority of words over pictures or pictures over words. Dina agrees to have her students contribute their own works of art to Jack’s literary magazine. They decide to have an assembly in which each side will put on a presentation arguing the case for words and for pictures. The school administration becomes impressed enough with all of this activity to retain his services as an instructor.

Jack pursues Dina romantically and ultimately succeeds. But, during his first night over, he gets drunk on her vodka and crashes headlong into her newest painting. He further confesses to plagiarizing a poem from his own son, a moral failing for which Dina is even more unforgiving. She throws him out and tells him she doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him.

He confesses the plagiarism to the school board and hands in his resignation. He asks only to continue for the rest of the year and put on the War on Words and Pictures assembly program. The board grants him his request, and the movie concludes with a satisfying resolution at the aforementioned assembly.

Cast[edit]

• Clive Owen as Jack Marcus
• Juliette Binoche as Dina Delsanto
• Keegan Connor Tracy as Ellen
• Bruce Davison as Walt
• Amy Brenneman as Elspeth
• Adam DiMarco as Swint
• Valerie Tian as Emily
• Navid Negahban as Rashid
• Janet Kidder as Sabine
• David Lewis as Tom

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

Words and Pictures grossed $2,171,257 in the United States and $1,175,000 in other territories, for a worldwide gross of $3,346,257.^[1]

Critical response[edit]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 43% based on 95 reviews, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The site’s critical consensus reads: «While both talented performers in their own right, Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen are decidedly mismatched in Words and Pictures, and they aren’t done many favors by the movie’s awkwardly constructed screenplay.»^[4] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 49 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating «mixed or average reviews».^[5]

Odie Henderson of RogerEbert.com gave the film only one and a half stars and wrote: «Unfortunately, ‘Words and Pictures’ fails at portraying both titular nouns. The screenplay by Gerald Di Pego («Phenomenon») is full of subpar dialogue, one-dimensional characters, scenes that belong in a different movie, other scenes that belong in the trash, multiple rom-com sins of cliché and a warped, stalkerish notion of what constitutes romance. When the hero’s idea of a term of endearment to the heroine is «you cold-hearted ice bitch,» one wonders what he’d say if he were pissed at her.»^[6] Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: «Schepisi, whose last film was his adaptation The Eye of the Storm, based on an Australian classic, is a general who marshals actors to bring emotional depth to almost any kind of screenplay. Here the human elements take the foreground, and romance comes trailing along forlornly behind. Not that the chemistry isn’t there between Owen and Binoche, who has rarely looked so beautiful onscreen, even playing a woman with physical handicaps. But the strange reticence of the scene when the two finally hit the hay feels like a throwback to the 1930s, including a huge cutaway that ends with the protags in bed with the sheets pulled up to their necks, saying how great it all was.»^[7]

Claudia Puig of USA Today gave Words and Pictures three and half stars and stated: «A thoughtful film about ideas — creativity, the power of language and the eloquence of visuals — it features two impeccable performances full of vitality. Clive Owen plays Jack Marcus, a voluble prep school English teacher who laments the reductive nature of social media. Juliette Binoche is Dina Delsanto, an Italian-born expressionist painter and art instructor at the same elite New England school. Both are disillusioned with life and education, and neither suffers fools. They are tart-tongued and cantankerous, but engaging.»^[8] Kyle Smith of New York Post gave the film only one out of four stars and wrote: «Predictability ensues in ’80s-rom-com style — he’s words, she’s pictures, get it? — as everyone pretends the cloddish dialogue is witty.»^[9]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Words and Pictures at IMDb
• Words and Pictures at Box Office Mojo
• Words and Pictures at AllMovie
• Words and Pictures film trailer at YouTube

Below is a massive list of movies words — that is, words related to movies. The top 4 are: film, cinema, television and filmmaking. You can get the definition(s) of a word in the list below by tapping the question-mark icon next to it. The words at the top of the list are the ones most associated with movies, and as you go down the relatedness becomes more slight. By default, the words are sorted by relevance/relatedness, but you can also get the most common movies terms by using the menu below, and there’s also the option to sort the words alphabetically so you can get movies words starting with a particular letter. You can also filter the word list so it only shows words that are also related to another word of your choosing. So for example, you could enter «film» and click «filter», and it’d give you words that are related to movies and film.

You can highlight the terms by the frequency with which they occur in the written English language using the menu below. The frequency data is extracted from the English Wikipedia corpus, and updated regularly. If you just care about the words’ direct semantic similarity to movies, then there’s probably no need for this.

There are already a bunch of websites on the net that help you find synonyms for various words, but only a handful that help you find related, or even loosely associated words. So although you might see some synonyms of movies in the list below, many of the words below will have other relationships with movies — you could see a word with the exact opposite meaning in the word list, for example. So it’s the sort of list that would be useful for helping you build a movies vocabulary list, or just a general movies word list for whatever purpose, but it’s not necessarily going to be useful if you’re looking for words that mean the same thing as movies (though it still might be handy for that).

If you’re looking for names related to movies (e.g. business names, or pet names), this page might help you come up with ideas. The results below obviously aren’t all going to be applicable for the actual name of your pet/blog/startup/etc., but hopefully they get your mind working and help you see the links between various concepts. If your pet/blog/etc. has something to do with movies, then it’s obviously a good idea to use concepts or words to do with movies.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the list below, or if there’s some sort of bug and it’s not displaying movies related words, please send me feedback using this page. Thanks for using the site — I hope it is useful to you! 👽

Free Films Movies English ESL Printable Vocabulary Worksheets and Exercises, Films Movies Picture Dictionaries, Crossword Puzzles and Word Search Worksheets, Missing Letters in Words and Unscramble the Words Exercises, Films Movies Multiple Choice Tests, Vocabulary Learning Cards, Flashcards, Matching Exercises, Games, Posters For Kids and Teacher. 24 different Films Movies English worksheets will help reinforce skills like reading, writing and vocabulary.

It’s a rare film that manages to be tedious and fascinating at the same time, but that’s precisely what happens with the clumsily-named and executed Words And Pictures. The film’s central conceit is right there in its title: a battle for supremacy unfolds between an English teacher (words) and his new colleague, who schools students in the fine arts (pictures). It shouldn’t work at all, especially when the relationship moves predictably into romantic territory. But it’s tough to completely dismiss the film when its awkward screenplay also features two intriguing central characters, played with subtle, almost miraculous depth by Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche.

English teacher Jack Marcus (Owen) is on the brink of academic implosion: his job is on the line, he’s barely making it to his classes on time, and he’s drinking a little too much for anyone’s comfort. But, just as things are looking really bleak, his downward trajectory is briefly interrupted by the arrival of Dina Delsanto (Binoche), a revered artist who’s losing her ability to make art as her body is increasingly ravaged by the aches and pains of rheumatoid arthritis. She values imagery and art; he treasures words and literature — their clash fires up their students’ imaginations, even as they bicker and spar their way into an evident mutual attraction.

There’s no denying that the film rests on an awkward foundation: the script keeps returning to the ridiculous dichotomy it establishes between words and pictures, pitting Marcus against Delsanto in a competition that makes very little sense. It’s all tied up with a subplot involving shy arts student Emily (Valerie Tian), whose ability to come out of her shell to be the artist she can be is all wrapped up with issues of sexual harassment and public humiliation. Frankly, it’s just not very good.

What is very good about the film is its two central characters, and the spiky, difficult and joyfully equal relationship that springs up between them. There’s so much depth, sadness and maturity layered into Marcus and Delsanto that it’s absolutely fascinating just to watch them in action, together and apart. Both characters have rough edges that aren’t sanded away, and the odd fireworks between them work precisely because both their lives have stalled: Marcus is a charming mess who lost himself somewhere along the way; Delsanto is a brilliant artist who can no longer express herself the way she wants to. Somehow, they wind up inspiring each other to do better and be better — and, instead of feeling horribly mawkish, it works.

That’s due in no small part to the excellent work done by the two lead actors. Owen sinks thoroughly into the part of Marcus, dialling up the charm and the horror of his character in equal measure. The film doesn’t soften or romanticise Marcus and his problems, which gives Owen plenty of great character stuff to do. Binoche, too, has ample room to uncover the sad, yearning soul of a whip-smart, independent woman whose illness has stolen not just her art but also a little of her dignity.

Ultimately, the fantastic and fascinating interplay between the two actors and characters are pretty much worth the price of admission. They’re surrounded by an odd, awkward beast of a movie, built on a very shaky foundation. But their brave, deep performances and bittersweet chemistry come very close to making Words And Pictures worth a lot more than it really is.