Six Ways NOT to Review a Film

A video essay about the six major problems with film criticism. //Join me on Patreon:   / moviewise   //Follow me on Twitter: https://x.com/MrMoviewise Once upon a time I thought that by reading reviews I would learn about cinema. Once upon a time I believed that critics and theorists were teaching me about cinema. It took me inordinately long to realize that (in the vast majority of cases) no, I was not learning about cinema. The reason was not (always) that these expected experts didn’t know, it was because the entire landscape of film criticism, film studies, film theory, film is uninterested in the formal and stylistic traits that make film… film. In our age to learn to talk about film is to learn to talk about any and everything that is not film. Formalist theory, the side of cinematic studies that pays attention to the aspects of cinema itself is a tiny minority in the area. As David Bordwell wrote “most film scholars don't analyze style, particularly visual style. Ironically, as films have become more available for close analysis than ever, interest in stylistics has waned. Why? Partly because film studies has for some time attracted scholars of a literary turn of mind, more comfortable with hermeneutics than stylistics (which remains a minor discipline in literary studies)”. In 2014, Matt Zoller Seitz pleaded critics to start writing about the filmmaking (https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/please.... Over 12 years later nothing has changed. For this video I compiled a list of the six major problems with contemporary film criticism. I look at them as the six heads of a single beast that prevents you from learning about the actual characteristics of cinema. Like monstrous heads they are connected to the same body and mostly work as one. And it’s only when you identify each head that you can realize why, as much as you read, and hear, and watch, you still fail to learn. What they all have in common is commiting the mistake of not basing their criticism on the film before them, but on an outside metric. It’s a recurring case of judging the play by the playbill. #videoessay #filmmaking #filmanalysis Circus Tent - Netherworld Shanty by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Scheming Weasel (faster version) by Kevin MacLeod http://incompetech.com Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/scheming-weasel Music promoted by Audio Library    • Scheming Weasel (faster version) – Kevin M...   Bushwick Tarantella by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Canon in D Major by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/