50 things I believe about movies

A manifesto in the form of a list

As this newsletter enters its second week, I thought I would take the opportunity to lay out where I’m coming from, as a critic and writer. A lot of these are things that I’ve been writing about for years, while others are my opinions of more recent vintage.

Do some of them contradict each other? Probably! But I am interested in continuing to have arguments about all of them. Here we go:

1. Depiction does not equal endorsement. 

2. I don't like to gatekeep about movies, but the one place I draw the line is that to opine on a movie, you should have to have seen it. 

3. Superhero movies can be great, and they can be bad. But I disagree strongly with the notion that they're the movies that matter the most. 

4. Similarly, there's an unfortunate tendency to see a fantastic, original movie from an unlikely genre or corner of the world, and to immediately pivot to, "That person should direct a Marvel movie next!" In most cases, I would rather that person direct the sort of movie only they would make. 

5. When it comes to popular movie franchises — Star Wars most of all— longtime fans who have loved the movies since they were kids do not and should not have a monopoly on fandom or opinions. I care a lot more about what today's 12-year-olds think about Star Wars than about what today's 45-year-olds think. 

6. Great movies do not need the validation of critical praise, awards, or box office success. I can wish for all three for the movies that I like, but they're far from necessary. If a movie flops, gets bad reviews or falls short of awards nominations, that does not mean it should not have been made at all. 

7. The Oscars are almost never fair, they don't usually get things right, and that's the way it's been for as long as the Oscars have existed. Similarly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an actor (or a director or anyone else) wanting to win an Oscar, and it's not fair to criticize someone as too "thirsty" for obviously wanting that. 

8. Speaking as a longtime Rotten Tomatoes critic: Rotten Tomatoes scores are far from the be-all and end-all of judging movies, and there's nothing especially untoward or unnatural about critical and audience scores not matching. 

9. Roger Ebert was right about the role of critics: "I have no interest in being objective or in reflecting the public's opinion. A critic should not be a ventriloquist's dummy, sitting on the knee of the public and letting it put words into his mouth. The only critics of any use or worth are those who express their OWN opinions, which the readers are then free to use or ignore."

10.  "That movie could never be made today" is the lowest form of conversation. Every movie in history has been the exact product of the exact time in which it was made. Everything about it, from casting to music choices to lenses, would have been different had it been made five years earlier or later. And if a movie was made in the past, it doesn’t need to be made today, because it already exists.

11. Whether a movie is "woke" or "not woke" is the stupidest possible standard by which to judge it.  

12. If you denounce a movie as "woke" just because it has, say, a racially diverse cast, or there's a trans person in it, or its director is an Asian woman, that's not standing on principle- that's just naked bigotry.

13. "Go woke, go broke" is a maxim with enough counter-examples to make it completely invalid.  

14.  I'm a big believer in the concept of a "problematic fave." There's nothing wrong with pointing out something wrong or dated in a movie of the past, nor is there necessarily any tension between pointing that out and continuing to love the film anyway. Whether those elements "ruin" the film — whether it's a racial slur, Kevin Spacey in the cast, or Harvey Weinstein in the credits — is up to the viewer to decide. 

15. Similarly, if someone points out that there's something problematic or jarring about a movie from long in the past, there's nothing wrong with saying so, and it does not mean that that person is advocating for that movie to be banned or suppressed. 

16. Blazing Saddles is a stridently anti-racist film that is almost entirely about white conservatives being mockable imbeciles. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a liberal or leftist plot to "ban" that movie. 

17. Content warnings, pre-reel disclaimers, and "Reframed Classics" introductions to movies — after which the movie is shown uncut — are not censorship, they do not "ruin" the underlying work, and ultimately do more good than bad. 

18. There's no appetite from anyone — critics, fans, filmmakers, studios, or anyone else — for bowdlerization of classic movies to conform to modern-day mores. When a few seconds were cut out of The French Connection, that act was defended by absolutely no one.  

19. Similarly, absolutely nobody — with the exception of a few social media randos — favors the return of the Hays Code or anything like it. 

20. When something in a movie is left ambiguous, it was probably left ambiguous for a reason. It doesn’t mean you need to “solve” it.

21. Film critics are never, ever scheming or conspiring against the movie you like. Few of us can even agree with each other on what to order for dinner, much less on whether or not we like the movie. 

22. Critics are critics, and we are not publicists, studio marketing executives accountants, or intellectual property lawyers. It is not our job to promote a film, nor to worry about how much money the studio might lose on it.

23. Critics are not "media elites" by any real definition of the term. The number of remaining full-time film critics is likely in the low dozens, and the majority of people writing reviews today are being paid little or no money to do so. 

24. Movies do not form a 1-to-1 symbiosis with the political cause they support. Criticizing Don't Look Up does not make one indifferent to climate change, nor does a bad review of Sound of Freedom mean one is in favor of global sex trafficking. A good movie can have bad politics and a bad movie can have good politics. 

25. It's not a fair criticism to call out a movie for being about the thing that it's about, instead of being about something else. Nor is it fair to accuse filmmakers of caring about the thing they care about, instead of the thing you care about. 

26. When someone writes a nutty cultural hot take, all that means is… a person wrote a nutty cultural hot take. The thing they argued does not then become the Law of the Land. 

27.  The least toxic fandom in the world is the Twin Peaks fandom. 

28. I hated everything about the "Release the Snyder Cut" movement but ended up really enjoying the Snyder Cut itself. 

29. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 is the best superhero movie ever made, with Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight a close second. 

30. There was never a good reason for anyone to hate Anne Hathaway, and the same goes for Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, and (most recently) Rachel Zegler. "She reminds me of people I didn't like in high school" and "She reminds me of my ex" are not valid reasons to dislike a performer. 

31. "Theater kid energy" gets a bad rap, and denunciations of it tend to have an uncomfortable undercurrent of sexism, homophobia, or both. 

32. There are all sorts of bad things about the streaming economy, and while it remains to be seen how that will all shake out, it's looking very economically unsustainable. But between the many choices across all of the streaming and VOD channels – and more importantly than that, the massive increase in the quality of TV sets over the last 25 years — now is a better time than ever before to watch movies at home. 

33. As a one-time video store clerk, I have a deep nostalgia for that era. But it had serious limitations, and Blockbuster was always bad. 

34. If you are going to watch a major movie on Netflix, I highly recommend watching it on the Netflix app on your TV, rather than the one on your phone. 

35. If you're a Steven Spielberg skeptic, in reality, what you are is a movie skeptic. 

36. On the "Jewface" debate: I'm sensitive to questions of representation, but I tend to err on the side of letting acting be acting, and for a religious test to not be imposed on movie casting decisions. Should John Turturro not have been allowed to play Barton Fink? 

37. It's perfectly okay to not want to see a particular movie. But "I Refuse to See [Movie] And Here's Why"  is not a piece that any movie website should ever assign. 

38. Hollywood absolutely kowtows to China, but they don't do it because they secretly support communism. They do it because a billion people live there, and they want to show their movies there and make money. 

39. There's much more to the career of Pauline Kael, one of the most important film critics who ever lived, than that quote about none of her friends voting for Nixon. That said, it speaks well of Kael that none of her friends voted for Nixon. 

40. Speaking of Nixon, there have been about five great movies about him, but none (yet) about Donald Trump. I know almost nobody on any side of politics really wants that, but I sort of do. 

41. Purple Rain has the best first five minutes of any movie. All the President's Men has the best last five minutes of any movie. 

42. The shaky cam is an abomination and has ruined more movies than any other filmmaking innovation of the last 25 years. 

43. Bad Luck Banging, Or Loony Porn, the 2021 Romanian film by Radu Jude, was the only great COVID-19 pandemic movie. I have no interest in ever seeing another movie that's assembled entirely from Zoom calls. 

44. As long as they are filmed ethically and without any coercion, there's nothing wrong with movies having sex scenes. Although I find it very odd that the conventional wisdom went, in about three years, from "there's never sex in movies anymore" to "there's too much sex in movies now." 

45. For documentaries, I will subtract one star if the entire film is scored with spooky music, and another star if there's a call-to-action URL at the end. 

46. Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing is The Great American Movie and the best film that has been made in my lifetime. 

47. "Film critic" and "Film influencer" are two distinct professions that don't necessarily need to be in any tension with each other.

48. I'm much more bothered by those idiots on YouTube who make three-hour videos about how women are ruining Star Wars and Ghostbusters. 

49. It's not a crime to be young, and it's not in any way a moral failure to not know about movies (and other pop culture) from long before your time. But discovering things like that can be highly rewarding. 

50. Everyone has blind spots when it comes to movies. You could be the world's most prolific critic, or hold a PhD in Film Studies, and there will still be great movies, from sometime in the past or some foreign country, that you are yet to discover.