You want to write. You’ve just watched something and, good or bad, your mind is abuzz with all of the things you want to say about it. There’s just one problem: you don’t really know what film criticism is. That’s okay! It’s truly not as complicated as you might think. Concisely, film criticism is two things working together: evaluation and analysis. Depending on the angle a particular writer chooses to explore, there could be more of one or another, but they are always present.
The most common kind of film criticism that almost everyone has engaged with is the review. This is the most straightforward kind of writing. The writer will watch a film and explain their opinions on the whole. They will evaluate the overall quality of the subject, but it’s up to the writer to choose which elements to focus on, whether it’s the performances, the writing, the cinematography, etc. Reviews are usually brief. It wouldn’t be kind to thoroughly spoil something new for readers. A review isn’t about a writer forcing people to agree with their opinions. Rather, it’s about intelligently explaining what was or was not successful about what they have watched, in their opinion.
Then, there are the pieces that you might have heard referred to as “features.” These are longer, more thorough pieces of writing. For one thing, spoilers abound. This is where you’ll find a deeper analysis of themes or tone or the metaphors contained within something. There’s no one standard way to conduct this analysis. It could take the form of a personal essay, where a writer explores their connection to a piece of media and its importance to them. It could also focus on the history of film, like if a writer were to do research about the history of specific genres or film techniques, for example. Features are not simply about analyzing the good and bad aspects of a film. They’re about having richer conversations about films and what we can learn from these analyses.
Film criticism has many angles and perspectives. How someone writes about film can be informed by a writer’s age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or lived experiences. None of these perspectives are any less valuable or important than the other. You can choose to write about the smallest details of a film, or analyze the totality of the finished product. Film criticism is vast, and that vastness leads to a wealth of voices that can share their individual opinions. But no matter how vast, we’ll always need to hear from more and more new voices. Each unique writer can teach us something new, and open our eyes to looking at film in a new way.
