By Mailan Nguyen
Circulation Editor
With adults dominating the business of movie reviews, Mira Costa sophomore Riley Roberts started to change that at the age of four with the help of her family.
Roberts has been making movie reviews on different websites with her mother and older brother for the past 12 years. This all started after her brother, Cole McNamara, created a website called “KidsPickFlicks.com” that allowed children and kids to be the movie critics.
Riley Roberts and her brother Cole McNamara on a segment of “Live Life and Win!”
“When Cole was nine years old and I was four, we went to go see a movie that both of us loved, but it made us sad to see that all the older movie critics wrote negative reviews on it,” Roberts said. “That’s when he got the idea to make the website that I started to write reviews for after watching movies every week.”
“KidsPickFlicks.com” was the original website that had all of Roberts’ reviews which her brother created in 2004 but was later bought by Fanala in November of 2013 who then named it “Crixit.com”. However, Roberts still continued to write reviews for the “Family Flicks” weekly segment but also other movie websites including “Reelz”.
Photos: Riley Roberts at movie premieres and in her interviews with actors
“By growing up a movie critic, Riley thinks independently and expresses her personality in her work. Where she really shines is on camera, both as a celebrity reporter and a comedic performer in her digital series,” Roberts’ mother Tara McNamara said. “Riley is very comfortable on camera and I think she would make a great talk show host.
Roberts has been invited to several movie premieres and events in the past because of her insight as a young film critic, Roberts said. Some of these events include interviewing actors at the red carpet and in movies such as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Grown Ups 2”. At these events she has met many famous and well-known actors including Jackie Chan, Zach Efron, Selena Gomez, Adam Sandler, Taylor Swift and many more.
Riley Roberts interviewing actors as a red carpet reporter at movie premieres from 2009 to 2014
“Going to all of those events, even as a child, was always really fun for me,” Roberts said. “I liked being able to critique the movies I watched, meet the celebrities that were starred in them, and being able to truthfully answer the question ‘is this movie good?’ or ‘should I watch this movie?’ when people come to me.”
Video: Mira Costa sophomore Riley Roberts movie critic.
Roberts says that in the future, she would love to be more involved in the entertainment industry by becoming an actress, but still plans to review movies for another two years until college starts. Roberts has already begun her journey to fulfill her goal of being an actress by being featured in three short films with her father at the age of eight, and has also been going to Second City Improv in Hollywood for the past five years.
“My family and I have always had a love for movies, I just find it fun to express what I think about them, what they could have done differently, or say what they did great on,” Roberts said. “The reason we created the website in the first place was to have kids be the critics and give them experience to potentially being involved in the entertainment industry if that was what they wanted to do.”
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