Critic, Curator, Artist

Letterboxd, after ten years of existence, has become popular enough that it’s fair to consider it a central part of contemporary movie culture. it’s a place to discover movies, to share opinions, to list your favorite movies, and, increasingly, it has become a place for filmmakers to share their own takes on other people’s movies.

And a lot of them don’t like to rate them: Mike Flanagan is prolific on the site but never shares his negative takes, or rates the movies he reviews. Chris Stuckmann, who has made a name for himself reviewing movies on YouTube, has recently stopped scoring them as he prepares to release his first film. Sean Baker does not even write reviews, just logs the movies he watches. Jim Cummings is a bit more all over the place, but he seems to only rate movies he’s really positive about, and older movies, similarly to what Chris McQuarrie does.

This makes one consider: now that we are all publishers, when we also act as artists, is it good to criticize other artist’s work?

The line between critic and moviemaker has been blurry for a very, very long time. And some great filmmakers did not give half a damn about offending other filmmakers.

The most famous example of this is the way the French New Wave was born out of the Cahiers Du Cinema, to this day one of the most respected magazines about cinema in the world. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and many more had started to formulate their aesthetic in reviews, essays, and polemics in the magazine, and in time they translated them into several movies that have transformed cinema.

Then we have Paul Schrader, who wrote about movies, then wrote movies like Taxi Driver, and directed great ones, like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and First Reformed, and he’s still active to this day and is very keen to give his opinion of other filmmaker’s movies on social media. We also have artists like Quentin Tarantino, who has never been a movie critic per se but has very often voiced his opinions on movies and appeared in podcasts to criticise them, a times quite harshly.

But this crossover has been relatively uncommon, for practical reasons. To be a published movie critic you had to connect with one of the handful of publications who needed one. Becoming a full-time critic was not much easier than becoming a filmmaker, and a very different path in terms of networking. But that had a lot to do with the barriers in the publishing industry, and in the past 30 years, these have been disintegrated. John August got it right when he said that we are all publishers now, that every time we publish in a public space, we are performing an editorial act.

So how to walk the line?

Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard in the Cahiers du Cinema’s offices

Flanagan has explained the reasoning behind the lack of “star ratings” in his Letterboxd reviews. Ratings are fun, as are lists, but they are also reductive. And meeting a fellow filmmaker after having given one of his movies a low score on a social media platform could be quite awkward, unnecessarily so.

But this policy also means holding back on tools of expression, and kind of letting go of the ability to give constructive criticism when it could be precious. And there is a meta-aspect to consider: given the way Letterboxd is designed, it would not be hard for readers to think that a filmmaker who usually praises movies might just dislike a movie when they do not write about it. Is that better than playing the game while acknowledging its limitations?

One strategy to go around this is to be very clear about what your star rating means. I do not rate movies on Letterboxd to compare them to other movies, but my rating reflects my perception of how well the movie has achieved its own goals. This is an imperfect scale as any, but it is not comparative. I gave 5 stars to Zoolander because I feel that it’s the best version of itself. If I gave four and a half stars to Interstellar, that does not mean that I think Zoolander is a better movie than Interstellar. I do not think it makes too much sense to compare movies, but in general, I probably would recommend Interstellar to more people than I would Zoolander. Yet, I see more internal flaws in Interstellar than I do with Zoolander, and that is the only criteria I use to give out starts, the only rule of that game. Then I write a short blurb about the movie, and that is the review, which is meant to be a recommendation mostly for my friends on Instagram, so I specifically approach the reviews with those criteria - mini reviews meant to give a sense of the experience of watching the movie.

With this system, I think ratings, being subjective, also manage to be a fun way to sort through reviews, but they also have less power. Reading the opinion is more important than seeing a rating. Megalopolis is a mess, but it is also a fascinating piece of filmmaking that holds way more fascinating ideas than most movies that are perfectly executed. A rating can’t capture that, and that is ok. There could be quite a lot of value in filmmakers adopting this kind of approach with freedom and playfulness. Great conversation can come from honest criticism.

But then again, I do think there are other paths that see platforms like Letterboxd as a means to curate rather than criticize. The paradigm that Questlove has preached and has lived for a while now, the one where artists are both creators and curators, can be incredibly effective. And there are many ways to think of this role. Martin Scorsese, Edgar Wright, and Christopher Nolan have all organized screenings and participated in panels as a way to introduce people to great cinema, even while not going into “reviews” of movies.

And that is going to be more and more relevant because the line between creator and critic will be always less clear. Some of history’s greatest movie critics, like Mark Kermode, Elvis Mitchell, and Roger Ebert, have also produced, written, directed, or been involved in some ways in movies. Now YouTube is one of the biggest spaces for movie criticism to operate, and the line between producing criticism and producing videos is very thin. Patrick H. Willems is a good example of this: he’s been producing video essays for years, and these have become more and more cinematic over time until he just started making movies.

What is going to be interesting to see in the near future is, more than anything else, if there will be any need for movie critics whose only job is to perform criticism. That is true for all kinds of criticism, maybe. I suspect that criticism will become increasingly democratized and that Letterboxd and Steam Reviews might be just as meaningful a guide to buying something as a “professional” review, especially if the design of their aggregation systems becomes more and more refined. But curation is always going to be needed; in a fragmented, post-monoculture world, it might be more crucial than ever.