In March of last year, A.O. Scott, the Pulitzer-nominated film critic for The New York Times since 2000 retired from movie criticism to return to book reviews where he had started his career. He left on a note of concern for the state of film and the next generation of film critics. "The way that I have practiced it has gotten harder to do," he observed in a podcast interview with Michael Barbaro. "The feeling of disconnection between the critic and the audience feels much stronger, the gulf feels much wider."
Scott certainly hasn't had so easy a time of it. He was targeted by Samuel L. Jackson and an army of Marvel fans for panning The Avengers, the point that made him seriously wary about fan culture in the criticism space, was labelled a pretentious intellectual in other places for the non-mainstream movies he did champion, and lest we forget he had the unenviable task of being one of several critics to fill the shoes of Roger Ebert on At the Movies when the titan finally left the show in 2008 -Scott’s time on it was just one year before the decades-spanning program was cancelled. Through all of this time he bore witness to a radical shift in film criticism, birthed out of the emergence of online culture, fandom dominance (which he noted in his tremendous exit piece its routine marks of conformity and obedience, likening it to political authoritarianism), and a sustained pervasiveness of anti-intellectualism that has resulted in professional criticism being more marginalized than it ever has been.
In its place has arisen the shallower movie discourse and movie 'fan' culture -the "content creator/influencer" sphere of film YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok. While 'film criticism' has become a dirty term in a lot of circles, synonymous with an idea of at worst out-of-touch elitism, at best ruining someone’s fun. Frequently you see ardent fans of movies point to the “Fan Meter” on Rotten Tomatoes that can be lopsided with its critical equivalent as the real mark of a movie’s value. They see movie appreciation as a democratic exercise where they are superior to the critics for liking what those critics perceptively are telling them not to. And as such an antagonistic attitude towards critics has been fostered -especially by those communities of franchise fans and towards the more traditional set of print journalist commentators.
And as a writer who somewhat belongs to that mould (I was the freelance critic at a local paper for more than two years) and who has been considerably influenced by that professional criticism space, starting with reading Roger Ebert's reviews in high school, it's disheartening to see. It's disheartening to see what criticism has become in the 2020s.
It should be noted of course that film criticism has always had its detractors. Art is subjective, and so any effort to critique or challenge a piece of art is likely to ruffle a few feathers of those to whom it has had a considerable effect. And average movie fans have always had a somewhat contentious relationship to critics in this regard, especially given the critics with the biggest platforms were often able to attain those platforms through privileges not shared with avid moviegoers. They were educated and at least modestly well-off, allowing them to be cultured and cosmopolitan. Great writers though they were, Bosley Crowther, Andrew Sarris, even Pauline Kael (much as she saw herself as a commoner) did not represent the general moviegoing public.
Yet as a discipline practiced publicly by select professionals, there was still a lot of respect for criticism, from middle class audiences and from movie studios and filmmakers themselves. Kael became arguably the form’s first true superstar in the United States with her sharp confrontational writing and often contradictory opinion to critical consensus spawning her own fandom, the Paulettes. And it shouldn’t be discounted the role of the French New Wave, and the knowledge that many of the biggest directors to come out of it were initially film critics, in legitimizing the form for a whole generation in the 1960s and 70s. Then of course, two critics from Chicago brought film criticism to the mainstream through two decades of a show that was one of the most successful syndicated series in America (I recommend reading Matt Singer’s excellent book Opposable Thumbs for more in-depth discussion of how Siskel and Ebert forever changed the perception of film criticism and the movies themselves).
But then the internet happened, and as some will tell you, film criticism -like so many other forms of public expression average people were previously ‘locked out’ of- became “democratized”. Anyone with internet access could post on a forum or a blog (I’m aware of the irony), or in video form on YouTube their own opinions on a movie, without editor or particular education or even significant background or experience with cinema either in a practical or appreciative sense. One of the first was Ain’t it Cool News, which also specialized in movie news related primarily to sci-fi and genre films, and managed to gain a fair bit of clout within the film industry and even traditional critical channels. It’s founder Harry Knowles even appeared opposite Roger Ebert on his show as a guest in the aftermath of Gene Siskel’s passing. This site eventually languished and has aged extremely poorly for swaths of heinous misogyny (as well as just tons of bad writing) largely on the part of Knowles, whose been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault. But it still may be the Rosetta Stone (misogyny and all) of the type of online film criticism that has now come to prominence in media culture and that threatens the more conventional, more considered form.
There are other culprits of course -the popularity of Rotten Tomatoes, which denigrates film criticism to a simple binary, and its aforementioned “Fan Meter” to further throw a wedge between the general audience and the professionals (pull quotes for movies have now been replaced by Tomatoes scores on posters and other marketing). And there are sites and creators like Screen Junkies and CinemaSins and their even more toxic successors that have taught whole swaths of viewers the wrong way to watch and assess movies -to focus on nitpicky details, plot holes, and brand continuity over the elements that most critics agree matter more: artistry, style, theme, and character. But of course it is much easier to judge a movie if it is approached as something to best through arbitrary scorecard or some other mode. Couple these sorts of things with the general decline in mainstream cinema, the rise of franchises and tent-pole blockbusters to a scale never seen before, and the consequent emergence into the critical space of those franchise fans, who judge then on their own criteria of fan service; and you have at least the predominant ingredients for where we are today in terms of the popular form of film engagement. A largely incurious, conservative form of understanding cinema that doesn’t much tolerate dissent or the value of subjectivity. For an example just look at the occasionally viral trend of Twitter thread or TikTok video mocking alleged “film bros” for liking international movies (those who make such videos tend to prefer to be perceived as not racist so always pick a random Eastern European culture to designate as disposable).
The result of this has been a warped version of film criticism unhelpfully embraced by major studios and marketing departments -who will even reach out to nerd culture influencers to help promote their movies, destroying any sense of impartiality on the part of the influencer; not that it would ever matter much to their audience. It's these movie 'fans' who are more in demand for their opinions and influence, at least as far as the industry and general audiences are concerned, and it can be frustrating to see such bite-sized and frankly uninteresting takes supersede the work of those genuinely invested in film as an art form. For a host of reasons explained in another essay, many of these especially young influencers have been conditioned by two decades of a more and more concentrated industry into a particular way of approaching movies -one that resembles more sports fans rooting for their favourite teams than a considered desire to experience cinema holistically. And of course this sort of thing cultivates a need for validation. And critics, traditionally, are not there to validate one's tastes.
Indeed, it can be argued that criticism openly strives to challenge tastes -even the critic's. And especially now, audiences and much of this breed of general creator-reviewers are not interested in being challenged -sometimes even viewing the auspices of challenge to be itself a negative. It's a bad movie if you don't immediately understand it, if it's not presented in an easily digestible way. Plumbing beneath the surface is simply 'reading too much into it'; nothing matters beyond what is clearly and indisputably up on the screen in sequential order. And it too is an attitude welcomed by the Bob Igers and David Zaslavs of the world -reducing movies down to their simplest, moss mass-marketable and thus dullest essences- and I fear the material effect its prevalence has on the shallow ways that movies get produced now on an industrial scale.
Really though it's just boring, this new class of film criticism. It scores points but doesn't engage, celebrates fan minutiae but encourages ignorance, is compelled by brands but repelled by actual movies. And it is that virulent, almost impassioned disinterest with the history and diversity of cinema, paired with a fundamental anti-intellectualism and closed-minded approach that is so dispiriting to see platformed as the normal way film criticism (or whatever it would rather call itself -"movie reviewing") is perceived in 2024. All the while thoughtful, interested criticism is pushed to the sidelines, mocked, and de-legitimized by seemingly all other parties, even for reasons as trivial as disliking something popular with fans or championing a movie from outside the borders of controlled discourse -it used to be you had to go for old movies or non-English movies to be labelled a snob, now it’s just anything without a marketable identity; liking Spielberg is snobbish now.
It’s clear the democratization of the internet has had a harmful effect on film criticism. The floodgates have been opened and now every opinion on a movie -no matter how biased or ill-informed- is taken equally. I worry about the potential validity of a borrowed sentiment from The Incredibles: "if everybody's a critic, nobody is". Film criticism becomes all but meaningless -it basically turns into either P.R. for corporate products or rage bait for clicks. And in turn the entities in control lose any incentive to make movies better, make them more than just products.
Thoughtful and honest, articulate and analytical film criticism is important because film is important, and it deserves to be discussed and taken as seriously as any art form. Ideally, it should be divorced from other adaptive mediums, cultural phenomena around it, or commercial conceits and taken on its own merits -though this is next to impossible in the current landscape. Deadpool & Wolverine cannot be taken on its own terms because at a fundamental level it is tied to various minutia of franchise history and politics, conglomerate business dealings, and a relationship with fandom reference points. That has to all be taken into consideration in watching the movie and commenting on it. But movies are still an art, regardless of the capitalist machinations around how they are forced to be made. And whether bad or good or somewhere in between they deserve to be judged as art -as a piece of expression meant to signify something about ourselves and our world. Film criticism is the act of striving to understand that, for ourselves as eternal students of art and culture and politic; and sharing that perspective not to ‘win people over’ but to open them up to an interpretation, to encourage them to consider new approaches and alternative voices, and to think critically in new ways about a piece that either succeeded or failed in some way to make a connection. Film critics who abide by these principles are non-compulsory guides to cinema, historians and sentinels of its value and potential as art. As long as movies exist, there will always be a need for them.
Right now, the future for them looks bleak. The internet has proven a real Pandora's Box of a public forum for film dialogue -there doesn't seem to be nor perhaps should there be any way of going back. I want to be an optimist though. I don't think the philosophy of criticism I highlighted above is going to die out. It should be emphasized there is no barrier to it, no gate-keeping. A.O. Scott may have the platform of The New York Times, but many of his contemporary published critics are working-class freelancers. You don't need a particular background or education to write or talk about films in a meaningful way; all you need is curiosity. And even among younger generations, I think curiosity with movies will still persist, and I don't believe the authentic critics now will go down without a fight either.
I also think it's important to note that this modern strain of shallow criticism is very much connected to the ecosystem it exists in compliment to; and that ecosystem as I've discussed is more of a frail thing than it appears. If the franchise machine grinds down or dies and more diverse kinds of movies take their place, perhaps we will see a resurgence in engaged film criticism. After all his concerns, Scott did conclude his film critic career on a note of optimism, noting all of the times that the Death of Cinema was supposedly inevitable and remarking, "the state of the movies is bad. But the movies themselves -enough of them, as always- are pretty good." And those good movies I'm confident will spark conversation and breed new intensive ways of analysing and discussing them.
I'm going to end here with some recommendations of critics you should read or follow -who have informed or inspired me in some way, or who just have interesting takes worth considering:
- Emily St. James -formerly of The AV Club and Vox, currently a writer on Yellowjackets.
- Matt Zoller Seitz -critic, author, and editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com.
- Mark Harris -film historian and author.
- Stephanie Zacharek -critic for Time magazine, formerly The Village Voice.
- Dana Stevens -critic for Slate.
- David Ehrlich -chief critic for IndieWire.
- Siddhant Adlakha -freelance critic.
- Robert Daniels -freelance critic and associate editor of RogerEbert.com.
- Justin Chang -critic for The New Yorker, formerly Variety and the LA Times.
- Odie Henderson -critic for The Boston Globe.
- Monica Castillo -freelance critic and programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center.
- Richard Brody -critic for The New Yorker (be prepared, wild movie takes ahead!).
And this is to say nothing of all the great critical video essayists that have emerged online in the past decade or so (who are deserving of their own essay), or the many critics of yesteryear whose work is still worth reading -chief among them Molly Haskell, Pauline Kael and of course the titan Roger Ebert -still the greatest entry-point for the form. Worthwhile film criticism, for all of its new perils and competition, is in no short supply and it's good to remember that.
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