How To Critique a Movie (and How Not To)

So, I'm about to get back into the swing of school fully, and I realize that I may not be posting reviews frequently anymore because, as crazy as it may sound, cinephiles and movie critics have a life outside of the theater. I must say, it's been a good run and a fun summer, and I've really enjoyed getting to sit down and just talk about something I really love: movies and how they work. However, one thing that I do realize is that I may have unconsciously facilitated a disconnect between the criteria I use to review a movie and how much of my criteria you actually buy as an audience member. So today, I have decided to do something: I'm going to sit down and explain my approach to reviewing a movie, and hopefully, this will help you understand me and more importantly, understand the increasingly noticeable gap between how a critic views a movie and how an audience member views a movie. Now, just a bit of a notice before I get too far: this article will be exploring my methodology specifically and using examples from movies I've seen to make my points, so while I do know that I've learned a lot of the same things in film school as other critics, I'm also aware that critically, I won't be a one-to-one comparison with, say, Brian Tallerico. But that said, grab your pens, your notepads, your flex-worthy collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, and your unnecessarily fine wine, and let's get into some of the methodologies employed by me and by others who have gone before me in my field.

First, I want to talk about themes in a movie, and before I get into this section, I want to post a caveat: I am completely aware of the bad rap that criticism from a thematic point of view gets, which is a viewpoint largely popularized by a well-known and divisive YouTube critic called The Critical Drinker, and to the Drinker's credit, he raises a pretty valid point. Ideas mean nothing if you don't have a well-written story to justify them, and I do wish that movie critics who are more embedded in the industry would realize that a movie is not necessarily good just because the main protagonist happens to have two daddies. To put it more eloquently, a movie is not good merely because it raises ideas that agree with the mainstream line of thought in Hollywood, and I do think it is time to stop praising politically provocative pieces because they affirm the beliefs of those in Hollywood (and at the same time, it's time to stop lambasting legitimately good films just because they cut against the grain of audience thought). However, there's something to be said about rare ideas and themes that get brought up in only the very best of movies, stop-you-in-your-tracks challenges to seemingly obvious intellectual structures that might sound something like "Is chance fair because it's unbiased?" No? How about chaos? To take it further, what does it mean to say that something is fair? Think about that for a while. Now this is a well-thought-out and very philosophically challenging theme, and I wish that people would take the ideas they raise in films further than "save the trees!" (Not that there isn't a time and a place for that). I think that the critical world would be far better off if they realized that themes are a result of a well-written story rather than the cause of it, but that's not to say that themes don't matter. I think it's healthy to expect a truly great movie to make us think deeply for a while. But remember, themes should always play second fiddle to the more objective and structural elements of a film because while a truly great movie will probably contain some heavy thematic material, themes aren't necessarily an objective or direct indicator of quality so much as they are a byproduct of a story. Don't praise the cake itself for having a good smell because that doesn't necessarily correlate with the quality of the cake, even if it very well might. However, it's fine to appreciate the smell of the cake for what it is.

I'd say that the most important part of learning to critique a movie has to be learning how to gauge the quality of a film's story and pacing, and I will be completely honest with you here: this is not only the hardest part of film criticism, but it's also what I think separates the learned from the amateurs and the professionals from the learned. Everyone can talk about the themes of a movie. Very few amateur reviewers know how to tell whether or not a film's pacing is very good, and this is a big reason why I'm generally not too impressed by Google user reviews or other audience reviews for a movie: they simply haven't trained themselves to look at a story that's being told and determine the quality of the telling. I like to approach gauging the quality of the pacing of a movie on two levels: on an overall basis but also on a scene-to-scene basis. I'm looking for a number of indicators when I look at a movie's pacing: first, is the writing tight? Does the movie say what it needs to be saying, or is it saying more than it needs to? This rule isn't always applicable, and I'll tend to give historical films a pass in this category, as they are telling an existing story, but generally speaking, less is more when it comes to your plotting. Are your story beats arriving when they need to be, or are they cropping up too early to the point where the film is rushed, or too late to the point where the movie is overindulgent? Does your inciting exposition (or the explanation of the stakes at the beginning) occur early enough, or are we left hanging until later on in the film to the point where the first half hour or so is just meaningless noise? Is your film always working towards its climax, presenting an air of inevitability, or is it meandering? These are questions I'll ask myself while I'm watching a movie, and while most moviegoers focus purely on the characters (and understandably so), there's a whole nother layer to film criticism, and a good film critic needs to take the intricacies of the story and the way a plot works to heart in order to deserve to be taken seriously. It's not hard to talk about ideas or performances. Anyone off the street can create an impressive-looking analysis of a film's themes. Anyone can be impressed with a performance deserving of admiration. But few take the time to learn how stories actually work, and it's these unhappy few (you've been warned) that catch my eye in critical circles.

Of course, just because the characterization of a film is the first thing that less-experienced reviewers pick up on doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. We have a "best performance" category in awards shows, so how well an actor or actress can immerse me in a story does matter to me, just not as much as the writing and plotting of the film may. But why do they matter to me, even if they're not as important to the structural aspects of a story? Well, the characters of a film are going to be the story's emotional center as well as its arbiters of ideas, and that's important, even if it may be playing second fiddle to the actual writing and plotting of the film. But then again, the two exist in a symbiotic relationship, as the story the film is telling does not exist without the characters that inhabit the story's world, and after all, the characters are what we remember about a movie. Even if they're supposed to be in service to the plot of the film, in a lot of ways, their legacy is stronger because we as humans relate to other humans more than we do to narratives. Do your characters make an impact? Do they have voices that are distinct from other members of the cast? Do their actions matter to the plot? Do you feel the weight of their actions? To take that last question a step further, do you feel the consequences of their actions? In addition, a truly great film is going to try to give every single one of its characters a voice that is unique from everyone else in the plot, and I know I'm watching a thoroughly made film whenever I see this effect play out.

On a less important (but still pretty crucial) tangent, I want to focus on the technical aspects of the movie, everything from the cinematography to the sound design to the production design. The visuals of a film are part of its artistic slant, and that's important. Is the cinematography distinct for the world a given film inhabits? What about the production design? The sound design? Finally, is there anything distinct or unique about the film's cosmetic aspects? I think that it's perfectly appropriate to complement the cinematography of a film like 1917 or No Time To Die when it's just so inarguably distinct or beautiful that you can't help but say something about it because such obvious artistry went into it or when the visual aesthetic is just so undeniably original, like in Everything Everywhere All At Once.  

Next, one thing I want to do is avoid letting myself be so swayed by the emotional beats of a story that I willingly overlook glaring technical flaws. Don't get me wrong: emotions are a good thing given to us by God, but they're not an objective measure of a film's quality, and I don't like to get caught up in them too often when I'm writing a review because relying on them almost always makes a movie either seem better or worse than it actually is. A lot of less-experienced directors and even some renowned ones on a bad day will lean on hard-core emotions of every stripe to try and make up for the fact that, in truth, their story is lacking a lot of the fundamental construction needed by a film. For example, one renowned director who leaned too hard on the emotional front for the good of his own story was Christopher Nolan and his 2014 science fiction epic Interstellar. Once you start looking for emotional appeals in a movie, they're not hard to find, and in almost all cases, this strategy is just intellectually lazy. When they're not backed up by anything of substance, like a well-written story, they become very noticeable. Back to the example of Interstellar. Very often, this film will forego strong plotting in favor of an emotional appeal and dig itself into a hole where it has to pull a lot of MacGuffins out of its behind to make the story it's trying to tell work. Now, Interstellar is far from a bad movie, but I think of its emotional strategies as a case study for where how a critic views a film and how an audience member views a film splits. Once you start looking for emotional appeals not backed up by anything in a film, you'll find a lot of them, and once you notice them, you'll never be able to not notice them again. The strategy of the emotional appeal, as good as it can make me feel in the moment, is unfortunately almost always intellectually lazy, and I hardly ever take it into account when I'm reviewing a film unless the emotions in question serve the plot at large.

Next, I want to be sure I'm avoiding franchise loyalty. Now granted, some independent properties contain more artistic merits than others. For instance, both The Dark Knight Trilogy and Matt Reeves's The Batman contain a lot of artistic license and genuine vision, whereas the vision of the MCU is more corporate, but granted, I also don't want to write off a whole franchise just because I'm not a big fan of their formula. Back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: I don't like their formula very much. I find it to be repetitive, uninspired, and lacking in creativity on nearly every level, but I will still give them credit where credit is due. I liked Wandavision for its campy riffing on classic sitcoms. I liked Black Panther because it was just about the closest thing we'll probably ever get to genre subversion in the MCU. I liked some of the older films as well, stuff like Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger. I don't want to write off the franchise in its entirety just because it has glaring flaws, but even more importantly, I don't want to accept anything and everything a franchise produces just because I happen to like that franchise. I love The Dark Knight Trilogy, but if you've read my article on The Dark Knight Rises, you'll know I raised some very noticeable criticisms of that particular film. This is another thing that separates me and other critics from audience members. Of course, I have my preferences, but those preferences don't keep me from appreciating art when I see it. And on the flip side, they won't make me defend a film that I don't think deserves it. Batman & Robin is a really bad movie, and even though I like Batman because he's had the most consistently top-notch and original filmography of any superhero, I'm not going to try and defend movies that I know are bad even if they contain characters that frequently inhabit films that are far superior.

And lastly, I want to talk about one specific, unprofessional, and lazy critical trope that drives me crazy, if I can even call it a critical trope. I'm talking about logic-poking a movie to death, of course. Very often, when someone who didn't like a movie can't think of an argument to direct at the bread and butter of the piece, they'll resort to logic-based arguments that sound something like "Why didn't this exact character do this exact thing at this exact time?" Well, because he or she didn't. End of discussion. It doesn't matter very often why a character did or didn't do the thing you wanted them to. The only thing that matters is how their actions influence the overall story of the film. Of course, this rule can and has been pushed to its logical extremes, but once the logic reaches that point, this conversation often becomes less about the smarts of the character and more about fundamental pacing issues, which is a whole other argument we can have later. Films are not a logic contest between you and the director, and if a bad character decision supports the plot of a film in a smart narrative way, I'm all for it. This critical strategy of poking at the logic of a movie drives me kind of crazy because it can be used to drag down even the objectively greatest of films if someone happens to not like what they're watching but doesn't really know how to convey their feelings in an intelligent or knowledgeable way, and it's a tactic that really just needs to go.

Well, I hope this has been helpful to you to learn some of my criteria when I'm reviewing a film. To punch through them all quickly...

1. Ideas matter.

2. But the pacing and plot matter more because they're objective.

3. Characterization is a powerful part of a story and has a stronger legacy, even if it serves the plot.

4. The technical aspects of a film are important.

5. Emotional beats are good drives in a supporting role but poor guides once they become ultimate.

6. I want to avoid franchise loyalty.

7. I want to avoid poking a movie to death with logic because it's almost always irrelevant to the plot.

If you're looking to get into film criticism, this is the big stuff I've learned so far. I know there is much more for me to learn, but I hope this helps you understand my methodology!

Proverbs 22:29