On my bookshelf and saved on my laptop are interviews, writings, live debates and conversations about religion, art, history, literature and film from some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. I found my way to these thinkers and writers through my parents, when I studied for my bachelor‘s, and as I graduated into adult life and my own unique worldview, through many hours of falling down rabbit holes and finding likeminded people.
At their best, critics like the late, great Pauline Kael were a profound influence on my way of viewing film. Kael’s idiosyncratic perspective and sharp aesthetic encouraged me to look at film based on my own tastes and values: connecting to art that was not deemed proper by the establishment, viewing pulpy and unacknowledged works critically. She, like many others, made me appreciate the history of film itself. Kael intellectually stimulated me even when I didn’t agree on a take – like with all the greats, it was the rigour and intelligence of the argument I admired.
It’s not that the democratisation of having an opinion and sharing it online is a bad thing. It’s just that it’s now the main thing, and it’s mindless at best, depressing at worst
This commitment to expanding one’s own personal belief system about art is becoming more obscure these days, and film is case in point. Amateur criticism has taken the place of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. It’s not that the democratisation of having an opinion and sharing it online is a bad thing. It’s just that it’s now the main thing, and it’s mindless at best, depressing at worst. It has no roots in the past; in fact it seems to me in total disregard. In the ever-shrinking empires of legacy newspapers and boutique art journals, the guillotine of austerity falls with predictable precision: staff dismissed, editors reshuffled. Film journalists are leaving or being laid off from publications with longstanding records of solid criticism in droves; critics from Chicago Tribune and Washington Post took buyouts this year, leaving the former paper without a head film opinionist for the first time in roughly 75 years. (Even in this magazine, we no longer run film reviews.) The vanishing act of full-time critics, those now-endangered arbiters of taste and intellect, proceeds at a rate so rapid, one might almost mistake it for a deliberate purge. The result is a hollowed-out landscape where criticism, once the province of the thoughtful and the informed, teeters on the brink of irrelevance.
So now we have a new generation, one that takes in Reels over reviews, references over the real thing: the death of the critic and the birth of the Letterboxd moron. Every man and his dog now has a Letterboxd account and a MUBI tote bag. They have self-congratulatory posts about the right way to feel about a buzzy movie. They don’t know what they really think, so long as they’re signalling to one another that they are cultured. Most people under 30 haven’t watched the films they meme about. Not really. They’ve seen clips, scenes, TikTok edits, Tumblr-era gifs that never died. To sit through the stillness of a film is rare. Being a cinephile was once for serious film heads who knew their stuff; now it’s that Letterboxd wannabe. Those raised on autoplay, watching Ozu clips on their phone. (It’s okay to not be into arthouse, you know!) Real criticism died somewhere, both in the war of ideas and from the slow decay of attention spans. A film is no longer something you experience, it’s something you scan for shareable moments.“What’s the aesthetic?” has replaced “What is this saying?” We’ve swapped out the gravity of Siskel and Ebert for half-baked five-star reviews that say things like “me when I’m sad” under stills from Persona.
Democracy in taste was supposed to be liberating. Instead, we’ve flattened culture into a perpetual stream of reaction and moodboard aesthetics.
There was a time, not long ago, when people listened – really listened – to what Jonathan Rosenbaum or Charlie Rose said about art. They shaped discourse. Now? If a movie doesn’t fit neatly into a TikTok-able hot take or feed a niche online identity, it doesn’t exist. I unironically would rather watch nothing but the Real Housewives franchise then partake in this pseudo-film culture by way of carrying a strategic tote bag and sharing Criterion Closet memes. The critic used to be a gatekeeper, and I wish they were still around. Now the gates are open, and the village idiots are flooding in, rating The Sweet Hereafter a 2.5. No doubt something with popular liberal topics and thirst-trap casting will be five stars even though it feels like a credit card advert.
Democracy in taste was supposed to be liberating. Instead, we’ve flattened culture into a perpetual stream of reaction and moodboard aesthetics. Real criticism – rigorous, inconvenient, opinionated – is over. The critic has died, and in their place we have influencers with better lighting and worse ideas. This is the empire of the casual expert, where your barista’s review of La Jetée matters as much as Susan Sontag’s. And maybe the most damning thing of all: barely anyone has noticed.
