From 1965 to 1983 Morgenstern was film critic for
Newsweek. During this time, he panned
Bonnie and Clyde and then reconsidered his opinion seriously enough to retract it in the next issue. That proved a golden marketing opportunity for
Warner Brothers to attract interest in the film by noting it made a major film critic change his mind about its virtues. From 1983 to 1988 he wrote a column for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Morgenstern's writings have appeared in
CNBC The New Yorker,
The New York Times Magazine,
Rolling Stone,
Esquire, the
Columbia Journalism Review and the
Los Angeles Times Magazine. He was a co-founder of the
National Society of Film Critics. Morgenstern began writing reviews for
The Wall Street Journal in May 1995. His movie reviews appeared each Friday in the "Weekend & Leisure" section of the newspaper, and he covered the movie industry in a column which appeared every other Saturday. He received the
Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005, becoming the third film critic to win a Pulitzer for criticism, after
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times and
Stephen Hunter of
The Washington Post. In 2022, Morgenstern retired from
The Wall Street Journal, with his final column running in print on April 29, two days short of his 27th anniversary with the newspaper. His final reviews for
The Wall Street Journal were for the films
Petite Maman,
The Duke, and
The Northman, all published on April 21. ==Personal life==