Longtime listeners may remember that a few weeks back I wrote a piece for a class I was visiting about how to poet. Now in a few days I’m going to talk to a class about being a movie critic. So once again I thought I’d put some notes here to get my thoughts together and maybe to amuse/interest regular readers.
I should say first of all that there are of course a range of approaches to movie criticism. Some critics mostly see themselves as in the business of providing a recommendation; they’re focused on the question of “should you see this?” Others see their role as promoting movies and movie fandom by, for instance, highlighting press releases. Others are interested in behind the scenes celebrity profiles. Some are academic critics who are writing primarily for other academics about film history, or genre construction, or treatment of women in film, or a range of other topics.
I tend to see myself as somewhere between a reviewer and an academic critic. My writing about movies often tries to let people know if they are worth seeing, but also tries to talk about theme and/or metaphor and/or what the film is saying about culture/gender/race/society/politics. You could group them under think pieces for the most part, though there might be more or less thinking involved depending on the movie and the venue and how many words I’m allowed to scribble.
Context? What context?!
So, having gotten those caveats out of the way—how do you (or I) approach a review? How do you figure out what to say about a film? How can you just sit down and watch a film and come away with words other than, “that was good!” that was bad!” or “that was somewhere between good and bad!”
Part of how critics generate different words is that they are generating words even before they see the movie. Or, to put it another way, every critic comes to every movie with a context. They know something about where the film fits into various discussions, and they go and watch it in order in part to figure out how it fits into those discussions.
Now, what the context is, or what the discussions are, can vary wildly, and can be simple or complicated. For instance, a critic might head out to Dune 3 thinking something like, “does this advance the story of Dune 1 and Dune 2.” They might see a horror film asking themselves, “is this as scary as other horror films?” They might go to see a new Tom Cruise movie thinking about whether Tom Cruise is too old or whether he is in fact still Tom Cruising.
These are all what you might call fan approaches to criticism; they all assume writers and readers are fans, and they all assume that the primary context for discussion is other films more or less explicitly referenced by marketing or by fandoms. The creators of Dune 3 figure that you’ve seen other Dune films; the creators of horror films assume that you’re into the horror genre and want to be scared; the creators of Tom Cruise movies generally figure you are familiar with Tom Cruise. These are the contexts that marketers tend to foreground, and in fact a lot of film criticism focuses on these kinds of contexts.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and I sometimes write in that vein. My review of Supergirl, for example, mostly evaluated it in comparison to other superhero movies and to Superman, to which it was a kind of sequel.
However! Often I’m more interested in different kinds of contexts. For instance, having read Dune the novel a time or two, I know that that book and its sequels are a kind of self-reflective colonial narrative. Paul Atreides is a colonizer who adopts the culture of the colonized and becomes more awesome as a result, much like Tarzan or the Lone Ranger or Natty Bumpo or a lot of “might whiteys” in colonial lit. Dune the novel arguably complicates that in some ways and arguably fails to complicate it.
I’ve been interested in thinking about how the Dune films handle those issues. Do they recognize that Paul is a colonizer? Do they care? Do they try to deal with that or run away from it?
I think they try to deal with it but can’t quite throw off the tropes, as I wrote about here.
“Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptations, and especially the most recent “Dune: Part Two,” try to build on Herbert’s anti-colonial leanings through subtle and not-so-subtle storytelling tweaks. Villeneuve goes further than Herbert did in questioning the basis of colonial narratives. Ultimately, though, he’s stymied by the same problems that undermined Herbert’s more liberatory impulses. It’s difficult, and perhaps impossible, to tell an anti-colonial story while centering the perspective, the heroism and the general awesomeness of a colonial hero.”
I got to that conclusion in part by reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book on Vietnam film, Nothing Ever Dies. I also thought about works like N.K. Jeminin’s Broken Earth novels which address colonialism morre thoughtfully. Those books taught me that one of the most important features of colonial lit is the focus on the colonizer. Paul Atreides may be good or Paul Atreides may be bad, but as long as you’re talking about Paul Atreides, you’re talking about colonizing power rather than about the people being colonized. The problem with Dune is who it sees as its hero—which is something you can’t think about without the context of works which focus on different kinds of heroes.
Where are you coming from?
With Dune 2, I had a lot of context to bring with me before I watched. I’d read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book, I’d watched a lot of colonial films, I’d thought about these issues in relationship to contemporary epic fantasy and science-fiction. And of course I’d seen Dune 1 and read a bunch of Dune novels.
I don’t always come to a movie with that much background. But I usually try to have at least something to think about. Sometimes, if the movie is based on a book, I will read that book to see how it was adapted—as with The Postman Always Rings Twice, where it turned out that the movie erased the book’s analysis of racism.
Usually, if I’m looking at a movie that I don’t know much about, I will watch the trailer and read the Wikipedia entry to try to orient myself. Sometimes I’ll read a plot summary if it’s available (I don’t really care about spoilers.) Then I’ll ask myself, what does this film seem to be about? What issues is it addressing? What problems can I see with its approach? How does it navigate those? Then as I watch I try to keep those questions in mind and look for details or scenes that address them in one way or another.
For instance, recently I was looking for something to watch and stumbled on The Furious, a Hong Kong martial arts action film. I like martial arts films, and this had good reviews. But since I was thinking about writing about it, I did a bit more reading ahead of time and learned that it was about child trafficking. That’s a tricky subject, and one which films often do not handle very thoughtfully. In particular, movies tend to present strangers as the greatest danger to children, when in fact the greatest threat to children is generally violence from family and family friends. I was curious how the movie handled that.
It didn’t handle it well. But thinking about those issues beforehand made me notice moments where the film did address (glancingly, nervously) the ways in which violent parents could be a threat to their own children. It also made me think about how the amazing martial arts set pieces were justified by dangers to children, and how violence in movies is often justified by dangers to children. I hadn’t necessarily thought about that a ton before, but it’s something I’ll think about in action films and other movies going forward. Watching movies, then, helps you build a context for, and questions for, other movies.
I should note too that context doesn’t always come from other reading or movies. It can also come from your own experiences or identity. I’ve discovered I’m neurodivergent recently, and have been thinking about that in relationship to films like Hail Mary. I talked a bit about my experiences with bullying in my review of The Plague, one of my favorite films from last year. My favorite piece of film criticism ever, James Baldwin’s book The Devil Finds Work, is about his understanding of films grounded in his experiences of racism. Your own biography isn’t the only lens through which to view film, and not everyone wants to approach film through a confessional lens. But it can be great when it works.
What about writing it?
Belatedly, I’m realizing that I’ve mostly talked about preparing for writing the essay as opposed to actually writing it. I think that’s because preparing—figuring out what aspects of the movie you’d like to address, thinking about the context you’re bringing to the film, thinking about what questions you have—is often the most important part of having something to say.
As for writing the piece itself…I generally have a sense of what I want to say or the issues I want to explore. I also will often have scenes, or dialog, or camera choices, or performances I will want to highlight, either for themselves or because they speak to the argument I want to make about the film.
I’ve been writing film reviews and think pieces for over 20 years now, so this is all pretty much second nature for me now. I would say that one thing that has helped me to avoid writer’s block is to realize that every review doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. I try to be honest about what I think of the movie, to explain why I liked or didn’t like it, to convey what it made me think about and why.
But not every movie is going to lead to deep reflection or insight; sometimes a movie will inspire you (because you love it, because you hate it, because it sends you in odd directions) and sometimes it won’t. If it does, great. If it doesn’t—there are more movies. Just watch the next one.
A very thoughtful approach.