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The critic's guidebook: conversations, advice and models for young, aspiring film critics

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The critic's guidebook: conversations, advice and models for young, aspiring film critics

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Content THE CRITIC’S GUIDEBOOK:
CONVERSATIONS, ADVICE AND MODELS
FOR YOUNG, ASPIRING FILM CRITICS

by
Brian Welk

________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

May 2016

Copyright 2016 Brian Welk

2
Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mom, Dad and Danielle for supporting me, and to Sasha Anawalt, David Ulin, and
Mary Murphy for guiding me.

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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2
ABSTRACT 4
INTRODUCTION 5
CHAPTER 1: MICHAEL PHILLIPS 8
FULL INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL PHILLIPS 10
MICHAEL PHILLIPS TAKEAWAYS – KNOW YOUR BAD HABITS 23
THE MARTIAN – AS EDITED BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS 26
BLACK MASS – AS EDITED BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS 29
CHAPTER 2: KEITH UHLICH 31
FULL INTERVIEW WITH KEITH UHLICH 34
KEITH UHLICH TAKEAWAYS – GET LOST IN A FILM 52
STEVE JOBS – AS EDITED BY KEITH UHLICH 54
THE WALK – AS EDITED BY KEITH UHLICH 59
CHAPTER 3: PETER LABUZA 62
FULL INTERVIEW WITH PETER LABUZA 64
PETER LABUZA TAKEAWAYS – BREADTH IS A LOST VALUE 81
SUFFRAGETTE – AS EDITED BY PETER LABUZA 83
CHAPTER 4: PETER RAINER 86
FULL INTERVIEW WITH PETER RAINER 88
PETER RAINER TAKEAWAYS – WRITE FROM YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCE 102
BRIDGE OF SPIES – AS EDITED BY PETER RAINER 104
TRUMBO – AS EDITED BY PETER RAINER 107
CHAPTER 5: MANOHLA DARGIS 110
FULL INTERVIEW WITH MANOHLA DARGIS 112
MANOHLA DARGIS TAKEAWAYS – BE IN TOUCH WITH YOUR BAD TASTE 127
THE REVENANT – AS EDITED BY MANOHLA DARGIS 129
CHAPTER 6: KENNETH TURAN 133
FULL INTERVIEW WITH KENNETH TURAN 135
KENNETH TURAN TAKEAWAYS – BE THE BEST VERSION OF YOURSELF 144
CAROL – AS ANNOTATED BY KENNETH TURAN 146
SPOTLIGHT – AS ANNOTATED BY KENNETH TURAN 148
CHAPTER 7: CLAUDIA PUIG 151
FULL INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA PUIG 153
CLAUDIA PUIG TAKEAWAYS – MAINTAIN YOUR INTEGRITY 169
YOUTH – AS EDITED BY CLAUDIA PUIG 171
CHAPTER 8: KEITH PHIPPS 174
FULL INTERVIEW WITH KEITH PHIPPS 177
KEITH PHIPPS TAKEAWAYS – PUT THINGS INTO CONTEXT 188
CHI-RAQ – AS EDITED BY KEITH PHIPPS 190
STAR WARS EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS – AS EDITED BY KEITH PHIPPS 193
CONCLUSION 196
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

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Abstract
This thesis is a compilation of interviews with eight working film critics, presented in
consecutive order: Michael Phillips, Keith Uhlich, Peter Labuza, Peter Rainer, Manohla Dargis,
Kenneth Turan, Claudia Puig and Keith Phipps. In a series of articles, transcribed Q&A’s and
annotated movie reviews, I offer a collection of takeaways by which young, aspiring film critics
can learn to improve and find their way in the industry of film criticism. Each interview explores
the film critic’s craft, philosophy, advice for younger critics, and outlook on both the
professional discipline of criticism and of the film industry more broadly. The reviews are
written by myself, but are annotated utilizing direct feedback from each of the critics
interviewed. They are intended as an example of the working critic’s ideas and advice in practice
and a window into the reviewing and editing thought process in 2016.

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Introduction
A young critic named Ben came to me for advice about criticism. He sent me one of his
reviews and asked if I would give feedback. I told him what worked and what didn’t, but I told
him I needed more.
Yet who am I to give advice when I am doing much the same?
I started writing movie reviews when I was 13 years old. One night watching Steven
Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, I commented to my family that I didn’t get the point of a brief
scene with Tom Hanks in a Laundromat. My dad simply said, “You’re always making comments
like that. Why don’t you try writing about it?” So I did. I started with a notebook that had an
audience of one: myself. Eventually that grew into a colorful website only a teenager could
design with an audience of just a few more. By my sophomore year of high school, I had joined
the school newspaper, The Torch, writing reviews and columns. When I made Editor-in-Chief by
my senior year, I realized this could be a career.
Because I grew up near Chicago, Roger Ebert was always a favorite of mine to read, and
his axiom, “It’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it,” adorns my email signature lines and
has governed how I think about things even beyond film. When you start to internalize Ebert’s
aphorism, you realize why criticism is so vital. I truly believe in the need to be able to articulate
why and how things work so that others can understand and better appreciate the world around
them.
Ever since those early days of writing, I have been reading movie critics and trying to
learn as much about film and criticism as possible. But I’ve never been able to pick the brains of
the people I admire. In writing this book I got my chance, and I chose to share what I learned.
The purpose of this Critic’s Guidebook is to serve people like Ben. You’ll get to know
these critics, how they think and how they do their job. Their conversations explore what it is to

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be a critic. They share their experiences and offer tips to younger critics on what to try, what to
avoid, what to look for and what it takes to land a job. But you’ll also see what they notice when
reading an amateur review. My reviews have been published along with their annotated edits.
Hopefully my reviews, as edited by these critics, are valuable documents filled with practical
advice, shedding light on the mechanics necessary for writing film criticism. Each will serve as a
benchmark for where I started and where I hope to end. With any luck, they will be a test of my
own tendencies. For these eight critics, I became their Ben.
But more selfishly, this book is here to serve me. I used my graduate thesis project as an
opportunity to do what I would have wanted to do anyway, specifically talk to critics about
criticism and have them directly read my work and comment on it. What I hoped to gain was
actionable feedback to improve my writing, as well as gain a potential foot in the door for any
critic who might have the power to help me land a job. I want to become a professional film
critic. I want to have a paying job writing about the movies, and I want people to read, respect
and/or revile my opinion. I want to be part of the club and have other critics I admire know my
name and my work. And though I’ve been doing this a long time, about a decade of serious
effort, I haven’t quite made it. I can still get better.
By the end of this experience, I expect to have grown as a critic, a writer, a journalist and
as a consumer of film. But I hope in reading this book we can each evolve as individuals more
generally. Film historian David Bordwell gave me this piece of advice personally, albeit
indirectly:
“Last year I moderated an Ebertfest panel consisting of a dozen or so critics. A student
from the audience said he wanted to be a critic too. Instead of advising him to get into a more
financially rewarding form of endeavor, like selling consumer electronics off the back of a truck,

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the panelists encouraged him. This form of altruism, in which you help people to become your
competitor, is alarmingly common in the arts. A moderator doesn’t get to talk much, so I
couldn’t respond. What I wanted to say was: Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an
intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts
generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films.”
(Bordwell 2010)
As you may have guessed, that student was me. The blog post containing that passage
wasn’t shared with me and it didn’t mention my name. I happened upon it completely on
accident, and it forever changed my thinking and approach to criticism. It is advice that many
critics give in some shape or form, but at the time this spoke to me personally, and I’m not sure
I’ve ever read such advice as succinctly.
Ebert again said that critics often make the best pundits. They’re capable of being the
thought leaders on social issues of gender, race, sexuality, inequality and the like because
they’ve been exposed to so many perspectives through their appreciation of film. They see the
world differently.
The critics interviewed in this thesis often express similar ideas. They range from a
background of young to old, from academic to journalistic, and from intellectual to populist. But
in each chapter I’ve highlighted the takeaways and ideas that likewise make each of them unique.
All eight look at the world through a lens of experience and varying perspectives. They have
ideas not just on how to be a good, successful, working critic, but also on how to be a good
thinker and good person.

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Chapter 1: Michael Phillips
Michael Phillips holds Gene Siskel’s seat as the film critic for the Chicago Tribune, but
he also literally sat in his chair for At the Movies alongside New York Times critic A.O. Scott. He
took over the show after Roger Ebert grew ill and lost his ability to speak and after the first
replacement hosts caused ratings to suffer. Phillips and Scott’s run hosting the show only lasted a
year between 2009 and 2010, but even for a while, Phillips was a part of a legacy institution in
film criticism that once had a big role in popular culture.
At the Movies was a Chicago institution, and watching it as a young critic was a first step
toward discovering more films, criticism and critics. But today there is no show with quite the
same influence as At the Movies, and no pair of film critics is famous enough to be late night talk
show staples or sitcom targets. I asked Phillips if he felt a show like this could ever again strike
the same chord in the mainstream. To him, the Siskel and Ebert model could only happen once.
Gene and Roger had a “frenemy” dynamic that was strange for TV even in the ‘70s.
“First of all, their sweaters were ungodly. Classic, bad Midwestern taste,” Phillips said. “I
was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, so I know.”
Phillips has done it all, extending his roots far beyond the Midwest. He joined the
Tribune as a theater critic in 2002, and before that he worked at the Los Angeles Times, the San
Diego Union-Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer and the Dallas Times-Herald as a theater critic. In a
series of what he calls “happy accidents” he found his way to a salary gig at the University of
Minnesota’s student newspaper and then on to a community radio station, KFAI-FM, in the Twin
Cities. His versatility throughout his career has made him a natural for TV and radio, and in his
writing he possesses a rare knack among critics of writing about musical scores in the movies.
But Phillips stands out because both his writing and his speech are plain spoken. He
doesn’t hesitate to say it as you want to hear it. For instance, the new Star Wars, “is good. Not

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great. But far better than ‘not bad.” (Phillips 2015) He’ll even acknowledge in his review of
Sisters that he perhaps was flat out not in the mood. (Phillips 2015) There’s no flowery rhetoric
here, very little hyperbole, and yet everything is carefully constructed. Phillips writes for an age-
old brick and mortar newspaper, but he isn’t an “old guard” critic, and his writing is tight and
scathingly sharp.
In other words, there’s no “bullshit.” Speaking with him over Skype from his Chicago
home, he wasn’t afraid to use that word more than once in our conversation.

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Full Interview with Michael Phillips
When you go into a movie, how much do you want to know when you sit down to see it?
I want to know a lot about what I might see. But I want to preconceive nothing about
what I’m going to see. So what does that mean? For the obvious points of research when you’re
writing about film, if it’s based on existing source material, if it’s a magazine article or if it’s a
novel that’s been filmed many times, whether it’s a stage play, Shakespeare or a living
playwright, I like to be smarter than the average bear when it comes to doing research.
Now, the trick with research is to know which direction to take it and when to call it a
day. If your head is basically full of the source material when you see the film based on it, you
end up reviewing a weird mixture of the movie in your head and the movie you’re actually
seeing. It helps to give it some time. Take the time to do the research early enough that you can
set it aside, forget most of it, and then take the film on its own terms to figure out if it works or
not. There’s not a single rule that applies film to film to determine if it’s a successful adaptation.
Faithful, high fidelity adaptations? No guarantee of success. And neither is the opposite.
What are some of the most important aspects of a film that you want to communicate in a
review?
When I write a review that works on some level it’s because I’m dealing with the visual
quality, the personality and rhythm of the thing. A lot of good criticism out there is strangely
light on the stuff that make up this obviously visual medium. It’s just a mistake not to grapple
with that stuff.
I’ve taught enough, all ages, high school kids, continuing education, people of all critical
temperaments tend to gravitate toward easy stuff, i.e. plot summary and narrative analysis,
because it’s easier to deal with, it’s safer ground, you don’t have to risk an opinion, really. But
the only way you can get your confidence and your critical faculties in the right position to write

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good criticism is to have done the work, the research, the preparation that gives you the
confidence at the keyboard to have the opinion that gets beyond the usual narrative analysis.
What gets left out of most criticism? Is it often the visual component and talking about
technique?
Technique! That means everything. You can’t deal with even a fraction of what’s really
going on with the techniques, the strategies and approaches in any given film; I don’t care how
unambitious it is.
Everything in life is more interesting than a plot summary. There’s no reason you should
devote an undue amount of whatever space you have to just hack through a narrative rehash.
There’s just no point.
You tend to write about music a lot. Is there a reason for that?
I’ve always been a sucker for the musical element in any kind of movie making. It’s often
the clearest, fastest and most mysterious way into the emotional life of a movie. At the same
time, nothing wrecks the movie faster than an over-eager, over-emphatic, hackneyed musical
score.
I think aspects of my career will later focus more on movie music. It’s something I come
back to a lot. But it’s just like any other aspect of movie making. There aren’t that many
practitioners of it out there.
Is it harder to write a pan of a movie or a glowing praise?
Those two polar opposites tend to be the least fraught in the intellectual process of
criticism. You’re having a very strong reaction and you can simply follow it and do your very
best to explain why and just provide the evidence for your argument. But the hard thing is
everything in the middle.

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If you see, let’s just say you’re Joe and Jane Average and you see two a week, so that’s
100 a year. Let’s say out of those 100, about 15 or 20 are really good. Full price, happy to pay it,
happy to tell your friends. Really good. 20 or 25 out of a 100, really, really not good. Two beers
on a couch, no amount of standards lowering can improve the movie. They’re not all technically
disasters, but there’s not much going on. That leaves 50, 55 percent in between inspiration and
disaster. How often do you come out of a movie and say, “It was okay”?
That’s 50 percent of what I have to deal with all year. And it’s very challenging to write a
mixed review of anything that doesn’t wander around in generalities and end up sounding wishy-
washy.
Frank Rich, the long time theater critic of The New York Times, very well regarded and a
great writer in many ways, on the way out of The New York Times, he wrote a column in the
Sunday paper, and in passing in this piece he acknowledged that in all the years he was a critic at
the Times, he didn’t really write the right amount of mixed reviews. He owned up to deadline
pressures; it’s easier to love or hate something on deadline, give it a star, and then move on with
your life. Mixed reviews can be frustrating to read and difficult to write. But I’m here to tell you
that you have to retain your intellectual honesty. It’s very hard to write those properly.
What do you think about star ratings?
They’re really part of the whole film reviewing history here in Chicago, so there was no
arguing with them when I got here. I don’t love them, and if I had my druthers we wouldn’t have
them.
They serve their purpose.
All it really does is force the critic to write interestingly enough so that people don’t just
look at the star rating and then turn to the next page.

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What’s your writing process when you sit down to write a review?
It changes all the time. Formula is the enemy. You want to not have any formula you’re
relying on. If you do, you start writing formulaically, and you don’t want that.
So the main thing to do when you sit down at the keyboard is ask yourself what is the
thing I must say about what I saw last night? If I really only have one point to make, small or
large, what would that point be? Maybe that’s your way into a review. Writing a good lede has
never been more important. I used to be cavalier about the quality or purpose and nature of my
ledes. I used to think I’ll warm up slowly and hopefully I’ll get to something interesting by the
second or third graf. That’s foolish thinking.
But what’s also foolish is this idea that you have to sum everything up in a lede or that
you have to come up with some grand summary point of view or statement. I think that’s often
too much freight for a lede to bear. It’s okay to open with the first thing on your mind. It can be a
small point or it can be a large point. Usually it comes out of that spontaneous impulse to talk
about what’s on your mind. That’s usually a good way to get into your review. Then you won’t
be writing a first paragraph that sounds like an officious throat clearing paragraph that are often
pretty deadly.
The main thing is when I find myself stuck at the keyboard and struggling to find a
decent lede, it usually means at some level I don’t feel like I know enough yet. Something’s
nagging at me and I need to address it. Maybe I haven’t taken the two hours to see a related film
by that director. Maybe I just simply haven’t thought through my reasons for feeling so mixed
about the results. Let’s say I feel thwarted by the prospect of writing another mixed review.
Often a great way to start any review is to talk about the exception to the rule. If you’re
slogging through a movie that’s only okay, there could be one scene, one performer or one shot

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that makes you think, “Oh there you go! That’s more like it.” That’s not a bad thing to point out.
Talk about how I physically moved forward in my seat and leaned into the movie for three
minutes there. That’s often worth addressing in some detail.
The other thing I realize about criticism, no matter what kind of critic you are, a good
review has to be about 50 percent reporting, reportage. You are re-creating and arguing very fine
points, and the details have to be very specific about the moments you’re trying to capture on
screen for people who haven’t seen the movie yet. If you’re talking about the quality or charisma
of a certain actor or actress, you have to grind through the details like a reporter analyzing a
certain aspect of a story. That’ll make it work as prose. If you don’t provide good hard evidence
for your argument, it’s just a bunch of generalities and bullshit.
When I read through my own work weeks or months or even years after I’ve written it,
I’ll find a distressing number of reviews that are perfectly acceptable that are not erroneous in
any way, and they may even have a decent line or two in them, but they’re tragically short on the
kind of specificity and detail that makes them hold up well.
Do you think other critics lack that reporting quality?
Some do, and some don’t. I think a lot of critics, not just film critics, really get by on pure
feeling, love and hate and disinterest, and these critics tend to be the ones who never write a
mixed review with a gun to their head.
But the movies are all about pure feeling. You have to respond accordingly. I love being
swept off my feet or being thrown into a rage. I’ll work it out later at the keyboard why I was so
incensed.

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And they’re not all old school newspaper critics. Much more from the online world or
essayists, they have the eye and the memory to recreate the moments that work even if you
haven’t seen that film.
Are there other things writers should keep in mind when writing anything, not just
criticism?
You’re always up against your own habits and clichés. You have to be honest enough
with yourself as a writer to know what those are and what those unhelpful habits and clichés are.
I’ll put this to you right now. Give me a word or sentence construction you know you
overuse.
I think I tend to be good at saying what something is about, but I can’t always translate
that into how I feel.
If you go through five or ten of your reviews, you’d find a pattern of a rhetorical question
lede or a question lede, if you just break it down to mechanics, you owe it to yourself to not do it
again. You become predictable and formulaic, and you don’t want that.
This sounds a little facile, but everything that we’re aspiring to in criticism is everything
filmmakers aspire to in the realm of filmmaking. They’re trying to avoid formula, avoid
predictability, and they’re trying to not show you what the last five films on this subject have
shown you, but something else, something different, something truer or something more
personal.
Here’s one thing I found very useful in every piece of criticism. When I’m done, I ask
myself two questions: Does this sound like me? Is this really me, or is this an approximation of
me. Or am I trying to inflate my tone or verbiage somehow? I want to sound like me. The

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flipside to that is, does this sound too much like me? Am I using too much first person, or is it a
little loose and need tightening up?
The second question is, do I agree with this opinion? Now that sounds kind of psychotic
that you as the critic would write something and that you would not agree with it. But you’d be
surprised how many first drafts flip up or down off their true opinion of it. It comes back to the
conundrum of the mixed review. For whatever reason on some subconscious level they’re trying
to avoid writing a mixed review.
How would you define your own voice? What does “me” sound like?
Well, I’ll reject that question. I’ve talked around this topic in finding your own voice.
You’ll get closer to it if you don’t torture yourself with that question but if you simply ask the
questions for starters that I just suggested: Does this sound like me, and do I agree with this
opinion?
It’s also good to know temperamentally if you as a writer or critic are predisposed to
writing a lot of first person or writing against it. Whichever camp you fall in, it probably is useful
to think about the other way. You might be overindulging whichever camp you’re in. If it’s
really working, you don’t need to remind anyone with an “I” or a “me.”
I tend to fall in the camp of not writing with “I” in my reviews, and I read a lot of bad
writing that just feels clunky when people try to do it.
There’s some weird mechanical shit that just becomes clear to you after a few years. If
you start too many paragraphs with “I”, you look like an idiot. You look indulgent and
narcissistic. There’s something wrong with that.
This is important too. If you’re dealing at all with the quality of the writing of the
screenplay, you have to do more than simply say the movie is funny. So often that’s the kind of

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assertion that gets no backup or interesting example behind it at all. It doesn’t help me at all as a
reader to hear that something is funny or beautiful. These overused generalities don’t mean a
damn thing unless I get an example.
This is what I’m talking about with generalities and bullshit. You can’t rely ever on an
editor to insert details into a review. If you get a really good editor, they may come back to you
and say they need a clear example. But you have to be your own best editor. It’s those moments
that need to be explained more than other moments. Just make sure that when you turn it in, it
has enough of the “furniture” you need to call it a review. What is the “furniture?” It’s the stuff
that no matter how idiosyncratic an approach you’re taking with a review, there are certain facts
that need to be in that review. Who directed the thing? Who wrote it? Is it based on existing
material? And what did you think of it?
One of my professors has said with screenplays, it’s form, not formula.
I like that. I think that’s right. The best thing you can do for yourself is look at the last
few reviews you’ve done and how you order that information and think how you can shake it up
a bit. Always always always, I tell every student I ever talk to, dare to impart just enough of the
narrative recap so that you’re not frustrating the reader to ask, “Yes, but what is it about?” But
don’t turn over 40 percent of your review to goddamn plot summary.
You should be trying to get away with as little as possible and give people just a taste of
what it’s about. Plot is very seldom the most interesting aspect of a picture. We’re going for
other reasons.
I think critics think that way about story in films, but I wonder how many others think that
way.

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Story gets them in the door, sure, but when you look at the history of disappointments or
flops, something went wrong with the story or the storytelling. This goes back to Roger Ebert’s
line, “It’s not what a story’s about, it’s how it’s about it.”
What would you say is the job of the critic?
Lead people into the woods with your flashlight. You’re going to show them the most
interesting creatures that live there. I’m trying to help people find the most interesting and vital
work that’s being done all up and down the food chain of the industry, the $4000 indie to the
$250 million blockbuster. Great work can be done everywhere by such an astonishing variety of
talents. That variety is not wide enough yet, but we’re getting there. The movie industry is so
much slower than television. It makes me crazy that they haven’t diversified their ranks.
But my job is not to promote the industry or be an advocate for business as usual but to
personally convey what I’m excited about, what’s interesting or galling or necessary about
what’s on our screens. That’s what I can do. The reviews, the good ones, if I write them well,
they work for people who have seen what I’m talking about and people who may see what I’m
talking about. They have to work for both camps. I don’t write with anybody in mind. It’s hard
enough to get things right for myself.
What would you say is the state of cinema right now?
We’re in a slow decline of tickets being sold every year. We’re also in a much faster
broadening of platforms and the way people are experiencing film. I actually don’t despair at all
about the future of cinema. People are going to go to the movies less, but there’s no less interest
in what people want to see with a camera. We’re all amateur 24-hour videographers now. People
do realize when they’re in the company of a filmmaker who really knows how to tell a story with
a camera and really does have a good story to tell, we realize they don’t come around every day,

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and that’s not something I can do at home. There is such a thing as technique and
professionalism and nerve. You need nerve to make good movies. There’s more nerve being
exhibited in television right now, but I think the film industry is waking up.
What is the state of criticism and film writing today?
The quality is good, but the tragedy is that so many good critics are out of work. I
experience no little sense of survivor’s guilt about just having a job, frankly. There’s weirdly
little corollary between the quality of criticism and the amount paid for that criticism. Strange,
but true. What I hope you can take from that is if you hang in there and develop as a writer and
critic, people start to notice, with any luck, and some of those people may actually help you get
to a place of solvency.
Do you think being a film critic is a career? Was it ever?
It is a career; it’s just not a career you can rely on. You could almost say the same about
old school newspapering in general, which is how I came up. That’s not a career arc that is easily
followed today.
There’s so much good talk, serious, funny and substantial podcasting on the subject of
film right now. There is so much good work online that feel like old school mainstream entities
like Slate and Salon. Dana Stevens is fantastic. And you can also look at The New York Times
and they have three of the best critics in the country right now between Manohla Dargis, A.O.
Scott and Wesley Morris, who was just hired from Grantland. That’s an incredibly strong trio.
It’s been tough in Chicago because for a brief moment when I started as the film critic of
the Tribune, Roger Ebert hadn’t lost his literal voice yet and he was still going strong at the Sun
Times. You had Jonathan Rosenbaum, a fantastic critic at the Chicago Reader. Not long after
that Time Out Chicago came along and had a really good critic and lead editor in Ben

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Kenigsberg. But now it’s tougher. Roger’s gone. The Dissolve came and went really quickly and
put a lot of good people out of work. But I’m grateful everyday that I’ve had 30 years in theater
and film criticism and that I’ve had the career I wanted. I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel about
that. If it went up tomorrow, I couldn’t really complain.
Talk about how you first got into criticism and writing reviews.
I wrote way back at my high school paper. It’s hilarious to think about it right now, a 15-
year-old writing about Taxi Driver. But the real honest to God savior to me, the college daily at
the University of Minnesota had a tremendously big budget, and everybody got paid, and in
1980, the editor of the paper made somewhere between $15-$20,000 a year. In the arts section,
we were making $10,000 a year, so why go to school? It gave us a chance to start bad and
hopefully get better. I was fortunate to get one of the film critic slots at the Weekly when I was
still in college, and it was a series of happy accidents.
“Happy Accidents.” That seems to be the trend.
But you have to put yourself very near the possibility of those things. One example of
that would be, I really didn’t have any business being on the radio at all, but there was a
community radio station, KFAI-FM in the Twin Cities. I’d go on to talk about film sometimes,
but I didn’t know how to do that. I had to learn. I had to hang around in the theater section for a
few years, just so you don’t have to be terrified of the performance aspect of television or radio.
But it clears out the system to talk about the movies away from the keyboard.
You sat in Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s chair on At the Movies. Do you think criticism
will have a place again back in the mainstream like it once did with them?
Maybe. People are foolish to try and recreate any kind of forum for movie criticism that’s
closely based on the Siskel and Ebert model. That can only happen once. It was so peculiar to see

21
those guys on television in the 1970s. First of all their sweaters were ungodly. Classic bad,
Midwestern taste. I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, so I know.
It was a complete fluke and a novelty that their “frenemy” chemistry really caught the
interest of so many people. But it was also monolithically a white show. You wouldn’t want to
see two middle aged white guys talking about movies as a cultural monolith. That’s not what I
would tune in for. And look, Tony Scott and I were as white as they came.
But I also think that our year on the show, by the end of it we had figured out, with the
help of a good producer, David Plummer, we had figured out how to be more ourselves. Back to
the point of “Does this sound like me,” you don’t want to perform a role you’re not comfortable
with. By the end we were really comfortable with who we were and how we got along on
camera, and people responded.
The tragedy about television is the numbers will break your heart no matter how you look
at them. In the cities where we had good time slots, New York, LA, Chicago, we had good
numbers. And in the places where we were on at 3:15 AM, nobody watched. At least I made a
really good friend out of it.
What gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
It’s a great privilege to be able to work out a completely personal response to somebody
else’s work in such a way that might be valuable to people other than yourself. That’s a real
privilege. If you can take the time, effort and care to do that job well, you’re not just working it
out for yourself, you’re actually a use to others, but in something more than a consumer’s guide
fashion of should I see it or should I not. There are enough people settling for that level of
criticism, and you want to aim a little higher. Give people something to think about, but you only

22
can do that if you force yourself to think about things more deeply than you might have
otherwise.
What else can young writers do to get their foot in the door?
You can’t wait around for someone to say, “Write for me.” You have to get your first 100
reviews behind you. When I think about my first 100 reviews, I cringe because they were inept
or overreaching or ridiculously snarky. I needed to get those out of my system.
So what can you do today? You can start a blog. You can find somebody, maybe, while
you’re blogging and say the words, “You can go to my site,” and hopefully can find somebody to
give you a shot; maybe it’s for compensation. Is there some radio station in your market where
you can contribute a podcast? The form doesn’t matter. You just simply have to get going.
It’s frustrating and lonely. And you have to find a way to eat. It can be very frustrating
and lonely at the beginning. But the weird thing about this work, and this sounds pathetic, even if
you have a job as a critic, it’s frustrating and lonely a lot of the time too. Writing is a solitary
pursuit. The movies are a public phenomenon, but we’re all experiencing a movie in our private
way. That’s a very strange public/private intersection. And in the end, you’re alone at the
keyboard. The frustration comes from not quite being able to find the words or the approach to
get people into the review. But there is a way. Keep writing a lede and writing and rewriting it
until you have something before you that you would personally read past. You can’t settle for
anything less than that. If you wouldn’t read past that lede, then don’t settle for that lede.

23
Michael Phillips Takeaways – Know Your Bad Habits
Michael Phillips put me on the spot: what is some word or phrase that you know you
overuse? I didn’t have a good answer right away, and I may have to do some soul searching to
find out.
The most important thing I took away from Phillips was that if you know your clichés
and your bad habits, you owe it to yourself not repeat yourself. There are five Orders of
Ignorance, one of which is getting to the point where you know what you don’t know. For me
that means being conscious of the overused phrases, the lack of specificity or the tendencies in
how I approach the film. If it only it were as simple as, for instance, repeatedly using the word
“sensational.” Fixing that just calls for a thesaurus. What Phillips is talking about requires deeply
analyzing your writing to the point of recognizing bad habits and trying to rewrite when you
come across them. Losing those bad habits altogether is another matter entirely.
In the reviews I handed to Phillips, my challenge wasn’t necessarily a specific word or
phrase but specifics themselves. You’ll first read in my review of The Martian, I wrote that Matt
Damon has an “everyman” quality that makes him someone we want to see survive. For my
Black Mass review, it was the adjectives “hollow” and “blindly” that didn’t dig deep enough into
what these films were actually like. They’re good reactions, possibly even accurate, but they
don’t really go the distance of identifying the particulars of Damon’s charisma as an actor, or
why Johnny Depp’s work in Black Mass as Whitey Bulger just felt like a hair and makeup
performance.
“If you’re talking about the quality or charisma of a certain actor or actress, you have to
grind through the details like a reporter analyzing a certain aspect of a story,” Phillips said.
“That’ll make it work as prose. If you don’t provide good hard evidence for your argument, it’s
just a bunch of generalities and bullshit. When I read through my own work weeks or months or

24
even years after I’ve written it, I’ll find a distressing number of reviews that are perfectly
acceptable that are not erroneous in any way, and they may even have a decent line or two in
them, but they’re tragically short on the kind of specificity and detail that makes them hold up
well.”
Phillips likens this habit among critics as a failure of doing the reporting and legwork
that’s necessary to give readers a strong sense of what they’re seeing on screen. Fifty percent of
every review, he says, should be “reportage.” When asked about the job of the critic, Phillips
said it’s to “lead people into the woods with your flashlight.” To be that effective tour guide you
have to have a certain level of specificity. You can’t rely solely on emotions and “pure feeling,”
no matter how much you were moved.
However, there was one word, a tiny one I might add, that cropped up an awful lot in my
reviews: “is.” In The Martian the “is count” is eight. In Black Mass, nine, and that review was far
shorter. Phillips couldn’t quite say why it’s a verb to watch, only that you subconsciously
struggle for energy as a reader as soon as you see a few strung together. Looking back, “is” can
read like a formality that reduces what ever comes after into a qualifier. “The Martian is
refreshingly optimistic.” “The Martian is methodical and practical.” They sound like
afterthoughts, and in such close proximity the writing sounds staid and repetitive. That’s not a
warning to never use “is” or the verb “to be,” but to pay attention to how often it comes up.
Phillips adds that you shouldn’t over-write with a verb like “careens” every time either.
Doing so sounds like a good first step toward developing a voice as a writer and critic.
And when I asked what Phillips’s voice was, he put another test to me, one that will govern all
the remaining reviews in this book: ask yourself the two questions, does this sound like me, and
do I agree with this opinion?

25
“That sounds kind of psychotic that you as the critic would write something and that you
would not agree with it. But you’d be surprised how many first drafts flip up or down off their
true opinion of it,” Phillips said. “I’ve talked around this topic in finding your own voice. You’ll
get closer to it if you don’t torture yourself with question but if you simply ask [these] questions
for starters.”

26
The Martian – As Edited by Michael Phillips
The most impossible feat in Ridley Scott’s The Martian is not that a man can survive on
Mars.
1
The Martian is
2
refreshingly optimistic, a movie that believes in not just the ingenuity and
resourcefulness of mankind but the camaraderie and good-nature. It speaks to the power of the
Internet and society in the 21
st
Century to collectively find a solution, but also rally around a
moment in history. At the end of The Martian the whole world is watching in a unified sensation
to see if Mark Watney will make it back alive. That’s an inspiring fantasy we only see in the
movies, and one even less common in 2015.
Who better to incite humanity’s collective attention and care than an everyman movie
star like Matt Damon?
3
Damon here embodies pure American values
4
and a can-do attitude, even
as he sheepishly blows himself up or loses his cool. He’s a guy, above all, the kind of guy you’d
want to be stuck alone on a planet with, but he’s a movie star and he’s better than you, so he’s
exactly the person we want to root for.
Damon is Mark Watney, a member of a mission to Mars that goes wrong when a violent
storm strands Mark from his team, who leave him for dead on the red planet.
5
When he wakes,
he quickly realizes his survival hinges on lasting long enough for another manned mission to

1
Good first sentence. As a reader, I’m on the hook already. You’re asking the question, and I
want to know, what is the most impossible feat?
2
Watch the repetition of the verb ‘Is’. If you use it twice in a row, especially right up top in the
lede, you struggle for energy as a reader, and you don’t even know why. It’s better to activate the
sentence than just rely on “is” or “are” as the verb… Already in the second sentence you’re in an
energy slump. But don’t go crazy in the other direction saying “careens” or “jumps.”
3
What exactly gives Damon an “everyman” quality...Think really hard about what kind of actor
this guy is and what kind of work he’s doing here. You always have to go from the macro
reaction to the more detailed and specific one. Saying “everyman” quality doesn’t help me as a
reader. And believe me, I’ve said that too.
4
You have this global village, but you still have this white bread, American male at the center of
it. You might want to point that out.
5
You never want to devote a larger percentage of your available space to narrative recap. I think
you’re okay here.

27
arrive, potentially as long as four years, on communicating with NASA to let them know he’s
still alive, and to grow food on a planet where nothing grows.
Good news! “I’m a botanist,” he proclaims, as if to say, “Challenge accepted. Bring it,
Mars.”
1
Mark gins up a way to grow potatoes for as long as four years, he finds a way to create
water (just take two parts hydrogen and add oxygen. Not that anything bad has ever happened
with humans trying to manipulate hydrogen), and he harvests leftover plutonium and a rover
from previous Mars missions.
Back on Earth, NASA’s scientists have to be worn down over time to reject their
cynicism. They’re all calculations and risk, dismissing Mark’s initially rudimentary attempts to
communicate. Soon they’ll come around, and so do we. There’s not a moment in The Martian
where we don’t believe in Mark’s gumption to survive or his creativity in McGyvering a
solution, even something as simple as “Duct tape fixes everything.”
Part of that is
2
The Martian’s embrace of science and logic. The Martian is methodical
and practical in its explanation as to how Mark will survive, and the film never harbors an
illusion that it’s about anything else but the ability to tackle the impossible.
But another part is that the film is perhaps quieter and more contemplative than the edge-
of-your-seat thrill ride that was Gravity, another lost-in-space film with impossible odds. Mark
communicates via video logs, so The Martian isn’t quite as reserved as something like All is
Lost, but it sets aside time for Mark to enjoy some bad disco music or to bemoan running out of
ketchup.

1
It’s useful to point out elsewhere that he spends a lot of time talking at us. That type of
conversational quality is useful. I don’t always say compare to actors. Give us three things it’s
not, in the same relative age and weight class. That would get us closer to naming what is
Damon’s thing.
2
That’s another case where you have two sentences in a row with ‘is’. Don’t do that.”

28
Gravity never had time for such scenes in its slick 90 minutes, and while that film found
incredible economy by never setting back down on Earth, The Martian’s Earthbound scenes
don’t feel like an after thought. Scott paces the film in dual, cross-cutting action, with NASA and
JPL engineering the same solutions for communication or for outfitting a rover as Mark is
figuring things out.
1
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jeff Daniels make sparks as NASA’s two directors
debating how best to allocate resources to rescue Mark. And following Magic Mike XXL, this is
the second film this year in which Donald Glover shows up halfway through and stops the show
with his captivating performance.
When Sandra Bullock touched down on Earth, she was all alone on an idyllic lake. The
Martian visualizes a breathtaking and inspiring homecoming in Times Square,
2
with the whole
world hooked on Mark’s safe return. Such a sight seems as unlikely today as a man trapped on
another planet. But The Martian earns those lofty aspirations and positive, inspirational
sensations because it believed in them to begin with.
3

1
It might be worth looking at the other movies loosely in this genre that Ridley Scott has
directed. I would like to know what you as a critic feel about him in general as a filmmaker.
2
A little misleading. He doesn’t “land” in Times Square.
3
Beware of ending on a preposition. It can be kind of lame. You make a good case of how it
works and I get a good sense of how it feels, opinion aside, of what it’s about.

29
Black Mass – As Edited by Michael Phillips
The best scene in Black Mass, a biopic on the life of Boston’s notorious gangster James
“Whitey” Bulger, is when a naïve, young waif of a girl is picked up by Bulger and her stepdad
after spending the night in jail.
1
Bulger grills her on exactly what the police asked of her and how
much she knows. What’s exciting about the scene is not the fear of what Bulger might do but
how oblivious she is to all the danger she’s in.
The amusing nature of this exchange may be entirely unintentional. We know exactly
what Whitey’s going to do with her. Director Scott Cooper has reduced Bulger into a monster,
not even a ruthless human being with a hint of dimension. He kills and has people kill for him,
and his fuse is so short that any sense of his humanity, or of those around him, is long gone.
Appropriately, Johnny Depp plays Bulger with an alien sensibility in line with his equally
eccentric performances for Tim Burton and others. Thin, slick-backed gray hair, a forehead that
dwarfs even his massively dark old-man sunglasses, and piercing blue eyes make him more
vampire than gangster.
But Depp’s performance feels hollow
2
in a movie that has little substance or real style
behind it. Black Mass documents Bulger’s rise to power in the South Side of Boston during the
‘70s and ‘80s when Bulger became an informant for the FBI and his old childhood buddy John
Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Connolly believes by looking the other way on Bulger, his intelligence
can help the agency land a more significant Italian mafia family. But once the mob is out of
power and Bulger is given a free reign of terror, the movie loses its steam. Cooper bookends the

1
It’s generally a good strategy to begin with a specific scene. But you need to pretty quickly get
to why it’s an exception to the rule.
2
It’s there in the previous graf, but more clearly say why this is “hollow.” If you’re going to
throw out a broad indictment of the performance of the movie, it would be useful to pretty
quickly give a little more why.

30
film with interview testimonials of Bulger’s crew making confessions, so there’s no tension to if
or when Bulger and Connolly’s jig will be up.
Cooper has some talent as a director, but not as a storyteller or stylist.
1
He borrows plenty
of Scorsese-isms from other greater and equally mediocre gangster films, but adds none of the
themes of morality or loyalty to any significant degree. It results in a lot of point blank shootings
in broad daylight, a lot of penetrating death stares and friendly conversations turned tense.
Cooper staged similar scenes of dire gravity and violent melodrama in his last film, Out of the
Furnace. But the Americana trappings had no bearing to social issues, as though staging these
scenes was enough to make such themes emerge.
Black Mass also falls into a trap of some unfortunate casting and poor usage of its
talented cast. Joel Edgerton is so blindly a hot-head, the anti-thesis to Depp’s low-key hiss, that
it’s a wonder he’s able to pull the wool over his superiors’ eyes.
2
People like Dakota Johnson,
Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, Jesse Plemons and Juno Temple are in the film so briefly they
barely register. And if it seemed like there was nothing Benedict Cumberbatch could not do,
make the Brit don a Boston accent and you may have found it.
In an interview with the police, one of Bulger’s cohorts is asked his opinion of his boss.
“He’s strictly criminal.” Black Mass is so flat and generic that it can’t be held in much higher
esteem.

1
I need more right there. Your version of that are the Scorsese-isms, but I think we’re muddling
what’s in the screenplay versus what’s on screen. You have to quibble with the right thing.
2
I think too often when people are writing about acting, they without realizing it slip into
describing character and not really performance as acted. Most things in movies are a
combination of two things or more leading to some sort of effect. But you have to be as clear as
possible in describing them.

31
Chapter 2: Keith Uhlich
“You really should be ashamed.” On January 10, 2014, Time Out New York Film Critic
Keith Uhlich, a position he held from 2009 to 2014, tweeted a photo of a hand-written letter he
received in response to a review. The writer took issue with Uhlich’s one-star capsule write-up
on the film Lone Survivor, which he called “war porn of the highest order.” (Uhlich 2013) “If I
were the surviving soldier, I’d come for you!” (Uhlich 2014) Threats such as this one still come
as a shock to any critic who receives them, but this was hardly the first time Uhlich faced the
scorn of the Internet.
“When I panned The Dark Knight in 2008, I was one of the first negative reviews on
Rotten Tomatoes,” Uhlich said. “That brought a whole host of fanboy vitriol my way in the form
of comments. And it felt like the biggest thing in the world, but it was really a drop in the bucket.
The world is not adamantly against you. It just feels like it is.”
With that in mind, I was still a little nervous to have Uhlich critique my writing. He
shared with me a story that Stephen Sondheim has told numerous times. When Sondheim was
17, he wrote his first musical and brought Oscar Hammerstein a copy to read. He was so
convinced that Hammerstein would love it, that it would get staged immediately, and that he
would be the youngest person to ever have his play on Broadway.
“Be brutal, no holds barred,” Sondheim said, to which Hammerstein replied, “this is the
worst musical I’ve ever read.” In Uhlich’s telling of this story, Sondheim’s face went ashen, and
he was devastated until Hammerstein reassured him by saying, “Hold on, I didn’t say it lacked
talent. But the way you’ve written it, it makes no sense for putting it on a stage. Come here and I
will show you exactly what you need to do, how you need to write this, and how the dictates of
the medium inform how you will write the piece.”

32
Uhlich shared this story with me because he believed that the fundamentals of what a
movie review should contain and what it should convey could conceivably be taught in an
afternoon. And yet an afternoon does not a film critic make, nor a playwright. Knowing the
basics and the tools of construction are essential, but it’s the nuances that Uhlich knows all too
well that are crucial to elevating your writing to something of its own creative endeavor and art
form.
Half of the questions I asked Uhlich during our Skype interview in October of 2015 were
ones I assumed would result in a practical answer, and I never got a single one. He doubled over
with perspectives and possibilities that resisted my reductive line of questioning, and he turned
each question into a bigger one of how the world operates and amplifies things in the 21
st

century.
Twitter makes everything sound as though the sky is falling. We need to be at peace with
the monotony of life. Many journalists’ confrontational nature makes it impossible for good
work to be done. Uhlich quoted everyone from Manny Farber, Walt Whitman, David Chase and
James Baldwin.
This was a deep conversation, and the longest in this collection by far. But Uhlich always
managed to bring it back to criticism, and he was consistently funny and self-deprecating in ways
that showed his personality.
Uhlich is a younger critic with a lot of seasoned experience in a full time gig but who also
knows the modern freelancing landscape. He got his start as a contributor to the film blog Senses
of Cinema and as a staff critic for Slant Magazine before becoming the editor of Slant’s blog,
The House Next Door, in 2006. Uhlich says it took a decade of poorly paid freelance work before
he became Time Out New York’s film critic in 2009, so it’s perhaps surprising that in 2014 he left

33
that full time job to return to freelancing once more, fully acknowledging he may never hold a
full time critic’s position again. His Time Out work showed the world what he could do, and
today he has bylines sprawled across the web, including BBC Culture, The A.V. Club, Reverse
Shot and Vulture, and as a TV critic for The Hollywood Reporter.
Uhlich even served as an Adjunct Professor at SUNY Purchase for a class called,
“Methods in Film Criticism.” His best students were the ones who had “compulsion” to do the
work and meet him on his level of thought and insight about the world.
“All I got coming up, pre-crisis in journalism, was discouragement. Whatever influence I
have, I want to be realistically encouraging,” Uhlich said. “This is not something to do as a lark.
No kind of writing is. But if you must, it behooves people who are at some level where they’ve
achieved success, and I think I have, to give back.”

34
Full Interview with Keith Uhlich
In one of your pieces, you wrote that you’re not trying to “convince” someone. What would
you say is the job of the critic?
Big question. The thing that leaps to mind for me is, “Be true to your perspective.”
Everything else follows through. One of the problems that I see is that a lot of people seem to
think there’s more exposure one is going to get in this job than really you do, and even if you do,
I think it’s kind of blinding in a way. Maybe it seems bigger than it actually is, especially with
the Internet amplifying everything.
As an example from my own life, when I panned The Dark Knight in 2008, I was one of
the first negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t care one way or the other, but that
brought a whole host of fanboy vitriol my way in the form of comments. And it felt like the
biggest thing in the world, but it was really a drop in the bucket. The world is not adamantly
against you; it just feels like it is.
I think there’s a lot that a critic has to filter out. Ultimately it comes to the point that
you’re writing for yourself, but there has to be a balance between the selfless and the selfish. It
can’t just be one or the other. There is a way that you’re giving something to the world, but
writing needs to be read. It can be read by one person or many people. That’s the selfless part,
the giving of yourself. But the selfish part is expressing what you think. Where the selflessness
can come in with that is expressing yourself as well as you possibly can, because a lot of people
express themselves very poorly. And I have too! That’s the thing you have to admit, that you’re
as capable of any of the bad things that you decry against as anyone. Otherwise you’re an
asshole.
What does bad criticism look like? Are people often not being true to their perspectives?

35
That’s the Catch-22. You can’t tell someone they’re not being true to themselves. It’s a
fruitless thing to do, and yet what often happens is there’s this clamoring for consensus that is a
really big problem. I guarantee you, even if you find common ground with someone and you
both like the same movie or hate the same movie, dig deep enough and you’ll find differences.
You’ll find differences in the way you appreciate it or where your appreciation comes from.
What that suggests to me is that each opinion is different and we should cultivate that a
little more, but not to the exclusionary sense of saying, “I am right.” I think the sense of right and
wrong needs to be taken out of it. It’s something I struggle with everyday, because it’s very easy
to want to be right or insist everyone else is wrong.
That’s the clue. If it feels easy to do, then it’s something you should probably look at and
question. Good work comes out of more difficulty more often. Although I can’t say that’s always
the case. There’s no hard and fast rule to say it’s always difficult to write, but I do think that the
struggling and thinking through of things…let’s say it takes effort. One day it makes you want to
kill yourself, another day you want to rip your eyes out, and one day it comes out fine. It varies.
But again it comes back to what I was saying about finding that balance between
selflessness and selfishness. Balance is really a key word for me. It’s ultimately in between the
extremes that we find the truth of something, where you’re most at peace. Balance and peace,
that’s what I think most.
Criticism now, especially on the Internet when you have the amplifier of Twitter and
social media, people are screaming, “This is right, that’s wrong, this is great, this is terrible,” and
most movies, or really all art, should be approached in a more level headed sense of mind. Not
dispassionate or lacking passion, but not amplified to insist that this is the be-all, end all.
What are some other things you do that writers should keep in mind?

36
On one hand I don’t want to tell writers what their process is or what it should be,
because it would be different for everyone. There’s a book I have called Daily Rituals that looks
at the process of different artists and collates them together to show how different we all are. One
of my favorites that I’m trying to copy in some way is Willa Cather, who says she tries to write
for two to three hours a day, because if she did any more she wouldn’t benefit from it. The trick
of course is Willa Cather always had funds to write just two to three hours a day. She didn’t
always need to write to a paycheck, so her process doesn’t necessarily work for everyone else.
A writer I love, James Baldwin, said, “You need to get your work done. Otherwise you’re
useless.”
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what my writing thing is, and I keep failing everyday.
I do find writing kind of torturous personally, so I do think I can only do a two to three hour
range comfortably. Albeit sometimes when I’m on deadline I can’t help it. I have to do what I
do. But I’m trying to find a regimented schedule. Now that I’m freelancing I have more freedom
to do that. What’s amazing is that I still manage to produce anything, frankly.
It’s about sitting down and staring at the page and doing the work until it’s there. How
you do that is dependent on each person. But you have to be compelled to do it. That’s another
Baldwin thing. “Sane people don’t want to write.” There’s a little glimmer of insanity in wanting
to sculpt something in prose or poetry.
So you still feel like you’re growing as a writer then? I read on your website some of your
reviews of Batman: The Animated Series or The Piano dating back to high school. Are those
still pieces you’re proud of? Or how do you feel you’ve grown since then?
I hate everything that I write after I’m done with it. It’s all crap.

37
It’s a bit of a joke, and there are a few pieces I’m proud of, like my piece on the fourth
Indiana Jones that no one read, or no one took seriously. Sometimes the things you’re most
proud of are the things that don’t make a dent. Once it’s done, I have to let it go, because I have
to move on to the next thing. And that’s what I get hung up on, the letting go. I publish
something, and then I look for reaction to it, which is a big mistake. My website has trackback
functions that show me where traffic is coming from, and I really have to stop myself from
clicking on those links because it takes me down a rabbit hole that’s really terrible. You may get
a positive comment, or a negative comment, but it starts ringing around in your head as a
distraction. It makes me not want to write, even if it’s a good comment, but they tend to be bad.
And the bad stuff echoes in your head more than the good. That one negative thing can stick in
your craw.
When I wrote about Carol at the New York Film Festival, I went through message boards
where they were talking about it. I had planned to write about other things at NYFF, but I have
not done that yet, in large part because I allowed myself to be crippled by that reaction. And
really the reaction is ultimately meaningless. It can’t help you. The only reactions that can help
you are from the people you trust who you would want their opinions. Hopefully you gather
people around you who are not just Yes Men. You don’t just want Yes Men in your life. You do
want people to challenge you, but you want people to challenge you in that way whose world
perspective you trust and can help you get at your own.
But this mass of opinion about opinion I think is very unhelpful. It’s there, and there’s
nothing you can do about it, except not look at it. I don’t bemoan the existence of the Internet,
but the problem is it’s very easy to look at it and very difficult not to. There we go again with the
thing I said earlier, if it’s easy, you should look at it and ask if it’s helping me.

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Who do you feel your audience is? Do you have an influence?
The audience is an amorphous concept to me. You think about it, and there’s no way you
can’t. Writing needs to be read. Movies need to be watched. But I think I’m at a point where I
don’t write for anyone but myself. I can’t let my work be shaped by what a reader might perceive
of it. I say I write for anyone who is willing to engage. I think there are a lot of people who
comment about me who don’t read me. This actually got me into trouble when I was going
through this message board the other day on Carol because I then started making a Twitter
argument about everything and I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve kept quiet and bit my
tongue, but I didn’t because it’s easy not to.
But I think there are a lot of people who don’t read me. They just cherry-pick certain
words. They skim, more than read. And then they ultimately say, “Here’s what this means, and
here’s why I disagree.” They’re looking for something to allow them to say, “You’re wrong on
this.” A lot of time it’s just a matter of star ratings. I’ve even given up giving hearts on
Letterboxd. I want people to engage with the prose. By it’s nature, prose is in itself a reflection
of how contradictory you are as a person. The Whitman quote: “Of course I contradict myself; I
contain multitudes.” You might contradict the thing you said right after the movie. Okay fine.
Write well. Write your argument well.
As far as, do I have an influence? Yes absolutely. I’m in the New York Film Critics
Circle; I’ve had a full time critic’s position at a time when I was told constantly coming up that I
would never get one. I don’t know if I’ll ever have one again. But the state of the world is the
state of the world at whatever point it is. All I got coming up, pre-crisis in journalism, was
discouragement. Whatever influence I have, I want to be realistically encouraging. If you tell me,
“Keith, I want to be a writer,” my next question is, “do you have that compulsion?” If you tell

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me yes, then it’s not for me to say don’t do it because you will figure out a way to do it no matter
what. It’s the thing that eats away at you inside. If that’s the thing you know you have to do, then
fine. Don’t do it as a lark. This is not something to do as a lark. No kind of writing is. But if you
must, it behooves people who are at some level where they’ve achieved success, and I think I
have, to give back.
People have come to me with questions like this, and I try to help up-and-comers who
want to write wherever I can and help them find their specific niche. It doesn’t have to be
journalistic. It can be academic. It can be a hobby and you can still be compelled. Maybe for
your own comfort and peace of mind, you need to have something that brings in some cash. I’ve
always found it difficult to write in addition to a day job. Some people can do it.
Do you have a day job now?
I’m full time freelance. I get most of my money through TV reviews for The Hollywood
Reporter and BBC America, and through the good graces of my mom and dad. Even at 38.
Especially in America, it seems there is this fear or sense that you’ve failed if you have a
champion, family let’s say, who wants to support you in whatever way you can. I think that
needs to stop. As long as you are not sitting on your ass, and I am not sitting on my ass. I’m
doing this work. It’s great if someone wants to support you! Some people do it all on their own,
and I understand that too.
You’ve probably seen some of the film Twitter breakdowns over racial and gender
divides of late, and those are very real issues too. Being white male is in this country, sadly, a
benefit, and it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be the benefit in the way that it excludes anyone else.
The minority part of me is that I’m gay, so I think I have some insight into that as well. Although
I’ve never really felt like I went through too much of the oppressiveness. I’ve just said this is

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who I am. However it informs my work, I think it informs it in the slang I use, the attitude and
pose I strike in certain things, the art I like and how I read it, but a lot of it is unconscious.
Talk about the difficulties of being a full time freelancer in this day and age.
Originally I was at Time Out New York in 2009. This was after almost a decade doing
freelance work that wasn’t paid very much and day jobs. I worked as a librarian. I worked in a
film production house. I helped a friend after his wife passed away babysitting his kids, and he
brought me on to edit the site he created, and all the work I did over that period got me noticed
by the editor at Time Out New York. I left it in 2014, and I left Time Out not knowing what I was
going to do. I had to cut into my 401K and use that as a buffer. But then I quickly got some
assignments from The A.V. Club, I got a teaching gig, and then I was asked to write for BBC
Culture and The Hollywood Reporter both about TV, which I love.
What Time Out ultimately did give me was people knew me and could see what I could
do in a full time critic’s position, and that opened some doors for me. The difficulty is always
keeping it going, and being ready for the other shoe to drop, and I’ve been ready since I left Time
Out. These assignments could go away.
There are pieces now, so many “think pieces” you’d call them, that try to bring together
all these disparate works of art as some kind of comment on the modern world, and it seems like
such a waste to me, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I don’t think you can
wrangle the world in that way. What you do is write about the work that interests you, and it’s in
doing that and expressing your perspective that you make more sense of the world, rather than
consciously trying to make sense of it. The unconscious way of trying to make sense of it is
writing your perspective on the work of art. The way I see it, you’re digging into it and trying to
make it live a little bit more. You’re not killing it. You’re burrowing into it and trying to

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illuminate it. By illuminating what it’s doing, what it’s saying, and how it’s saying it, that’s the
beauty of it. If your words can do that, and the work of art can survive your dissection, that’s
what I aim for.
What advice do you have for new freelancers trying to get that foothold and prove
themselves?
One thing I think is less of a problem than it was is publishing yourself to a potential
audience. One of the nice things about the Internet, and it is a nice thing, is that everyone, even if
you were poor, you could go publicly into a library and create your own site through Wordpress.
There’s a large capacity for people to publish themselves potentially to a worldwide audience
with a click of a button. And that is a massive change from where things used to be. There was
more of a naturally cliquish sense, a hierarchal sense of getting your work noticed or getting it
where people might take notice.
Start with your own site. It’s easy to create one and cheap to maintain. Have it be simple,
and have it be the place that you work out your things and such. I came up before that, and I
went to sites like Slant Magazine and pawned myself for free.
But know the venue you eventually want to be writing for. Some people will still say they
don’t want to give their writing to anyone for free ever, ever, ever. By that nature, that can limit
you. If you’re fine with that, that’s fine.
One of the greatest problems we have is a sense of entitlement that the world owes us
something. And I’m not talking about bad business practices either. I think what Ariana
Huffington is doing is despicable. When someone has money and they don’t give it out, that’s a
horrible thing. But I also think there’s this sense that, “Why do I have to do all this work to get
noticed” on the part of aspiring writers sometimes. The other thing you have to realize is, maybe

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all that work will never get noticed. It’s kind of like Van Gogh barely selling a painting in his
life. Melville’s most successful book is his first one, and it doesn’t become successful until 160
years after it’s written. Now it’s a staple of classrooms.
So it helps to remind everyone of those stories now and again, because there has to be a
base love of the work that you’re doing to get you through the tough times, which may be mostly
tough times. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve had some success, more than some. I don’t want to
speak from a position of looking down and entitlement. We’re all in this together. There’s no
guarantees, and there’s no guarantees for me now either. These assignments that I have, it really
could all go away in an instant, and guaranteed it probably will some day. A lot of life is being at
peace with the fact that nothing is guaranteed.
What you can do is control things from where you are. Starting your own site is one
thing. You already have the potential for a global audience there. That’s easier to theoretically
get than it ever was. What it has to come down to is not worrying about the audience. If you’re
going to exhibit your work and the way you study it and hone your work in public, then you have
to let the audience be whoever it will be. If it’s nobody, fine. If it’s everybody, fine. How do you
deal with those extremes of nobody’s liking it or everybody’s liking it? Artists want and crave
those extremes because they know their effort has been worth it in some way, but I think we
need a spiritual, mental shift to say, as much as we enjoy it when someone praises us or criticizes
us, we more often need to live in this space of accepting the monotony of things. We create
extremes to live at to feel like something is happening, but I think life is pretty monotonous all
told.
I don’t say that pessimistically. You make the interest of each day. It’s just a matter of
finding that satisfaction in the mere construction of prose and words, or however you do your art.

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That’s of paramount importance. Really the only thing that matters, have the thickness of skin
and the peace of mind to know how to balance that out. If you live too much of extremes, you’ll
tip over and not be able to do your work. You need to be balanced in order to create. I guess
there are unbalanced artists, but the unbalance should come from the canvas, not from the world.
But different strokes for different folks. I never want to force my methods or perspective
on anyone. As long as you give others the freedom and have the freedom to be who you are,
that’s peace of mind.
What aspects of a film are most important to communicate in a review?
Make it live on the page through your words, and illuminate what you think it’s doing.
The viewer is the last piece of the puzzle. The viewer connects with a work of art, and it’s in that
space that it lives in some way. When I say illuminate, it’s as much for the things you love, the
things you hate, and the things you feel indifferent to. And it’s very difficult with something
you’re indifferent to because how do you take something you don’t feel all that much for and
make it live on the page? That’s a challenge too.
It’s important to communicate the experience that you have of it, because it’s unique. For
me, against consensus. I don’t think consensus should be an issue. I don’t understand Oscar
punditry. It makes no sense to me. I don’t know why you’d look at a film and say it has “Oscar
potential.” I’ve used terms like “Oscar bait,” but I’m trying to move away from terms like that
because they seem reductive to me.
There’s so much more to the art of acting and cinematography among other things.
Especially with a film, there are so many different points of entry into a movie. I talk about
directing a lot, but Bette Davis was often a more interesting entry point into her films than her

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directors. Emmanuel Lubezki or Roger Deakins are more interesting entry points to the movies
they shoot than the people who direct them.
Sometimes it’s just about what the final whole of the product communicates to you. With
criticism, it’s about identifying the entry point that most spoke to you. How did you get into this
particular labyrinth? It’s almost like a maze that has no beginning or no end. You don’t extricate
yourself from the best ones; you get lost in it forever. There’s something wonderful about being
lost in something forever, trying to illuminate it in some way, and you think you’ve got a grip on
it, and then you watch it again and some other avenue opens itself up to you. I say to my
students, I wish they were more comfortable in being lost in a work of art.
What a lot of bad criticism does is try to nail something down for once and forever. Great
art isn’t like that. You can’t nail it down. Criticism needs to reflect that. You can try and do it
confidently, and with finality in some way. But it too can feel expansive and beyond the margins
of the page.
One of the things I read on your Letterboxd was a quote on 12 Years a Slave. You wrote, “I
truly dislike the ‘derelict appendage’ of film criticism that seeks to identify and exalt for all
time the one movie that gets a given subject right.” Do you think that is a reflection of some
bad film criticism?
“Derelict appendage” I should specify is a Manny Farber quotation. Really that’s a point
where I was moving away from what the film is doing. I even go on to say that I don’t think
McQueen is courting the awards. I don’t think it’s the film’s fault, and sometimes it’s the
problem of reviewing the reaction.
Some of my best friends are Oscar pundits, but I have no interest in it, and I can’t
begrudge anyone who wants to write about movies in that way. There are a few people who look

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at movies from a business, awards perspective and do it very well: Mark Harris, Nathanial
Rogers, Nick Davis. It’s interesting that they’re also all gay men.
There’s a surfeit of Oscar punditry, and there’s a surfeit of bad critics, but I don’t think
it’s my place to say they can’t do what they’re compelled to do. So unless I’m being adamantly
oppressed, and the government is telling me I cannot write any kind of writing except Oscar
punditry, that’s a thing to fight against. If it’s something on Twitter, most of the things people
say are not addressed to anyone specifically, but rather to the void, and it’s easy to get irritated
by that and think the sky is falling. I don’t think it’s representative of the sky falling, and it’s not
on me to say you’re wasting your life to talk about movies in the superficial awards kind of way
that you’re talking about it. I have the freedom to not look at movies in that way, and these
people are not preventing me from doing that.
Some people might say that the fact that is the dominant nature of the beast… but that
again comes down to entitlement. You stand outside certain things and certain ways of looking at
films and you’ll find yourself on the margins. Even people who do the more popular type of
criticism, there was an article today on Lights Camera Jackson. “He’s the youngest and most
powerful film critic, the first movie he ever saw was The Lizzie Maguire Movie, and his favorite
movie is Beauty and the Beast,” bla bla bla. If you see him talking he’s an irritating little shit.
But I can’t look at that and say… look, one of my real pet peeves right now is when someone
tells me Idiocracy is a documentary, which I think is an insult probably to Mike Judge and how
good he’s capable of being. As much as Mike Judge might satirize certain things, it doesn’t mean
he out and out hates everything he presents. I guess everyone thinks we’re all headed toward
Ass: The Movie, just a farting ass on screen for two hours. I’d say if Chantal Akerman did an ass

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farting on screen, I guarantee people would find brilliance in it. And who’s to say they wouldn’t
be right? Andy Warhol did a person sleeping for six!
If you’re going to take something down, you need to have all your ducks in a row, dive
bomb the shit out of it and then get out of there. Know your subject to the point where you can
take it down, and often times when you study a subject that you hate, or you think you hate, and
you really go deep enough, you start to see the nuance and complications, and the hate changes
into something else. It’s not purely reactive of you screaming against the sky falling or the
apocalypse coming. It’s something else far more complicated and harder to parse.
But we want things to be easy to parse, whether Hollywood populist movies or Godard-
iphiles who think that anyone who doesn’t like Goodbye to Language is a philistine. I don’t think
that’s helpful at all.
Uh oh. I don’t like Goodbye to Language. Although I like Godard quite a bit.
I had someone unfollow me because I only gave Goodbye to Language four stars instead
of five. These are the irritating things that are easy to get angry about and easy to use as evidence
for the world being a terrible place and for the culture being corrupt and for the job you’re trying
to do being not as great as it was. We’re neglecting the fact that something was always off in
whatever area we were in. We’re elevating these irritations that are really not oppressive in the
way we’re making them oppressive to such a level that we’re not doing the work we need to do
that would be the best of us.
This is the daily struggle. I say all this being part of it. I am not above this struggle. I am
as capable of all the bad things I speak against as anyone. Accepting that will give you the
strength to be the best of yourself when you do the work. It’s very difficult to do the work well,

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but when you do the work well, there’s nothing like it. I think you know when you’ve done a
good job, even if you look back and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?”
As long as you have, as I like to call it, that perfect moment with the piece and can say,
“Yes, this is done,” and then you let it go. That’s another tough thing, letting something go that
you worked on and letting it have its own life. It’s like creating something living in a way,
though it lives through people who interact with it in a sense, but hopefully it’s there for
someone to come across it at some point. The 12 Years a Slave thing, that’s been up there for a
while now, but it got new life because you looked at. You thought about it, you brought it up
here, and creating that posterity I feel is real important.
Is that posterity something that gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
The satisfaction is when I’ve finished a piece, it’s the best kind of high. Doing a good job
creatively, it’s a high like no other. Drugs cannot approximate it; sex maybe approximates it,
except orgasms only last one and a half seconds, and the euphoria from a well written piece is all
the more wonderful.
Everyone has their metaphor, and the purging of the waste around that makes you feel
whole again. Even at that base level, there’s some kind of connection to that. Maybe we’re just
being vulgar, but my friend Matt Prigge always says, “bodies are stupid,” and I tend to agree
with that. I live for that creative high. It’s a high like no other.
What’s the state of cinema right now? And as a TV critic as well, I’m curious how you feel
film stacks up.
It depends on how you look at it. A lot of English speaking criticism is very focused on
Hollywood as its focal point. Now we’re in a much more globalized place like China, Japanese
or Indian cinema. I read India has 17 separate industries catering to 17 different dialects, and

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that’s not just Bollywood. In Africa you have Nollywood cinema that has low budget, DIY stuff
made for a homegrown audience, but this is cinema too.
What is the state of cinema? If you’re honest, you can’t say with any certainty because
there’s more of it than you’ll ever be able to see. So you need to have a focal point of where to
look. My suggestion is to look everywhere, even though you can’t. If you are willing, it sets you
up to realize that there’s more in Heaven on Earth than just your philosophy. It’s not just
Hollywood. It’s not just Marvel movies. It’s not just movies that play at Locarno as programmed
by Cinema Scope. There are a lot of barriers you could put around it.
I think we need to get to a place where we talk about moving pictures in all their many
forms. This could be things that appear in cinemas, on TV screens or in museums. One of the
best things I saw was Abbas Kiarostami’s Movie 5 as five separate projected installations.
They’re moving pictures. That’s maybe the be-all, catch-all for me. Within that, there’s so much
you can delve into. On my Best List, I’ve gone to putting Netflix series, short films, music
videos, and it should always be with an air of, “This is not a canonical 10 Best list.” We can’t
really do canonical. We can only do the things that moved us most, and we lead people down
paths, but only by their own choice. It comes back to the point of, who do I write for? Only the
people that engage. So it has to be a reader that’s willing under their own volition to engage in
that.
I think cinema is very complicated, even among movies that play in theaters. It’s big, it’s
broad, it’s beautiful at times, and it’s totally fucking frustrating at others. You will go along with
seeing sometime the mediocre shit that saps your soul. The bad stuff at least has energy;
someone felt this and just did it so poorly. On TV, the second season of True Detective; what a
shit show. But what a distinct shit show it was! I enjoyed watching the hell out of it. It was

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purely Nick Pizzolatto distilled, and I have to give him props for that. I love the sense of
someone having their vision fully on screen, and it was there all the way through. It was total
fucking garbage in terms of everything it was doing ultimately. But I would watch it again,
because what glorious badness it was.
I want people to take risks like that. There is personality there, and I see indie films
where I go, “Why are you even behind the camera?” I saw a film where the guy directed it, co-
wrote it, and I think starred as three different androids? And it was passionless. He couldn’t act,
he couldn’t direct, he couldn’t write, no talent whatsoever, just no passion. But he had some
money and decided to make a movie. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in the sense of, “Why
are you wasting my time?” I don’t think True Detective Season Two wasted my time at all. As
terrible as it was, it’s just amazing to feel like I was in a very specific worldview. I love that
when you feel that bearing of your soul. It’s wonderful.
Long winded answer again; movies are complicated, and I don’t see that changing at any
point. Movies always will change, and when people say they don’t make them like they used to,
well of course. It’s not then anymore, it’s now. I was born in the ‘70s, but I didn’t come of age in
the ‘70s to have the down view of the ‘80s that everyone has. I don’t particularly like the
nostalgia, but I didn’t grow up thinking that everything in the ‘80s was just shit as a lot of critics
did and felt the form was dead. I just think art’s going to die when the last human goes. That’s it.
As George Carlin said, the planet will shake us off like the fleas that we are sooner or
later. Even then, if the Voyager Spacecraft survives, we’ll have the remnants of our civilization
floating in space out there, so there’s always the chance that our work will touch someone. You
let your art go, and in a lot of cases it will outlive you. But you have to embrace that, like
humans, it has the capacity to be impermanent. We create the things we create in our own image,

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and we are not permanent creatures. Our art reflects that in more ways than one, but that’s
probably a deeper discussion than we need to go into.
What do you think is the future of film criticism?
Speaking for myself, I’m optimistic because I see so many people who are younger than
me wanting to pursue it, just of their own volition. I taught a class that was mostly 19-22 year
olds, and the two best students were the 19-year-olds who really got into Jacques Rivette. I
talked with an 18-year-old at NYFF, and he’s already into Hou Hsiao-hsien and really disparate
people. It heartens you to see that there’s hunger for so many different kinds of films. They can
like the Hollywood films and the films that are more esoteric from the Western perspective.
Everything has a possibility to be beautiful in its own way, wherever it may come from. It’s
fascinating to study the different systems and how something gets made, but there’s the
possibility for beauty in so many different ways.
I see that in criticism too. There’s this natural desire in young people to express
themselves. As far as “intelligently,” maybe there’s the rub. It’s easy to look at Twitter and
Facebook and think the sky is falling, but how much is Twitter amplifying really the majority of
the opinion? The smart people know not to amplify themselves through Twitter. We’re the quiet
people. We don’t shout our opinions but think them through and hone them. I feel like I keep
meeting these people.
It’s all over the place, and somehow beauty gets created out of that chaos. I don’t really
see that changing. I don’t really see that as something that has changed. There will always be
people who want to express themselves. Surely there’s a problem in adequate compensation in
people finding full-time journalistic jobs, but at a certain point you have to take stock of your
own situation of supporters, benefactors, contacts or if they’re doing it all themselves or do it as

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a hobby and earn money another way. Everyone has their own way they’re trying to survive, but
if you’re constantly obsessing over all these issues of where you’re working, it gets to be so
unhealthy that you can’t do the work.
But as long as there is a person alive who loves this form, it will survive. I’ve met and
talked with a lot of people who love it in their way. I don’t see it going anywhere, and it’s not
going to go anywhere as long as I’m around.

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Keith Uhlich Takeaways – Get Lost in a Film
For Michael Phillips, critics help traverse a forest with a flashlight. For Keith Uhlich,
movies are a labyrinth you both try to illuminate and into which you get lost. Those are beautiful
metaphors however you say them, but especially the idea of being lost in a film. That you can
find yourself inside a work of art, figuratively wandering around in its ideas and magic and never
quite unlocking its secrets. Uhlich says many writers attempt to make their reviews the definitive
opinion on a text, as in, “this is right, that’s wrong, and there’s nothing more to this movie. My
word is the final word!”
“What a lot of bad criticism does is try to nail something down for once and forever.
Great art isn’t like that. You can’t nail it down. Criticism needs to reflect that. You can try and
do it confidently, and with finality in some way. But it, too, can feel expansive and beyond the
margins of the page,” Uhlich said. “What you do is write about the work that interests you, and
it’s in doing that and expressing your perspective that you make more sense of the world, rather
than consciously trying to make sense of it.”
The fear of nailing a film down once and forever stems from another of Uhlich’s points,
that Twitter and social media amplify everything. With that many voices, who wouldn’t want to
feel as though their opinion was the definitive one? When the Internet can flood your inbox, your
comments section and shame you publicly, who would honestly want to be on the wrong side of
consensus?
My struggle has always been trying to predict where the rest of the world (or at least film
Twitter) might fall on a movie, kowtowing to popular opinions not strictly in terms of the movie,
but the politics, the controversy or the reaction around the movie. It has subconsciously
prevented me from writing those pieces that would show my true perspective. My writing should

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focus more on the spots that helped me get into a film, not where everyone else did. There is no
consensus. Not if it’s good. Not if it’s interesting.
In the case of my reviews for Steve Jobs and The Walk, Uhlich says I managed to “write
through the movie,” doing plot description such that it becomes criticism. My entry point into
these films was in the specific moments that most resonated. You describe what a scene is doing,
what’s going on in the subtext and what it all means. In doing so, you start to get lost in the
work.
“You’re giving the experience of watching the movie again by writing through it
beginning to end. It’s almost like you’re giving the reader a sense of it inhabiting you,” Uhlich
said. “How do you describe what is in front of you to illuminate what is going on between the
spaces that are there? You’re digging into it and trying to make it live a little bit more. You’re
not killing it. You’re burrowing into it and trying to illuminate it.”
Uhlich feels we often read into the reaction because it’s easy to do, and by that logic it
should be easy to stop. The hard part remains using your words to illuminate a film. In our
conversation, I sensed even Uhlich’s frustration and insecurity, such that he can still feel his
writing is bad after he’s done with it, and that he’s not above the daily struggle.
“I am as capable of all the bad things I speak against as anyone,” Uhlich said. “Accepting
that will give you the strength to be the best of yourself when you do the work.”
It makes me feel better about my own writing, that no matter what Twitter thinks, the sky
isn’t falling.

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Steve Jobs – As Edited by Keith Uhlich
Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t invent the personal computer. They didn’t invent the
portable music player, or the smart phone, or the tablet, or most recently wearable tech. What
Steve Jobs did was make technology inviting, accessible and fashionable. That was his
innovation and his genius. And it’s something of a paradox that the most successful tech giant is
not the one with the newest or the best technology, but the one that reaches its users personally.
Steve Jobs, the new biopic directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin,
expertly plays on the conflict within Jobs’s embattled ideologies. Like Sorkin’s The Social
Network before it, Steve Jobs goes beyond the notion that many great men have to step on others
to get to the top. It reckons with the idea of being great and being a good person as two sides of
the same coin. It enlists Apple veterans Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Andy Hertzfeld to take
up arms against Jobs’s deceptively flowery rhetoric and his vision of democratization. And yet
the film’s style and staging presents a man still in the right, not just an asshole but the only
asshole who saw the world in the right way.

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Sorkin breaks Steve Jobs up into three chapters, each staged in real-time just minutes
before the product launch of the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT launch in the late ‘80s after Jobs
was ousted from Apple, and finally in 1998 when he was brought back to unveil the iMac. Not
only does the screenplay have an identical setting structure, Sorkin layers the narrative structure
in a way that’s rife with narrative callbacks and payoffs. It’s excellent dramatizing, even if it
largely stretches the truth of the 30-odd minutes between Jobs taking the stage.
1

One of the first things we hear Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) say is “Fuck You” when
his programmer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) says they can’t get the voice demo of the
Macintosh speaking “Hello” to work. Boyle shoots the scene in a hazy, docu-realistic filter, and
in this first moment looking down on Jobs from the fish eye of the projection screen above, it
places Jobs at odds with the world. Immediately Sorkin makes the observation that though the
Macintosh was made for “everybody”, the computer can only be opened up by special tools
nowhere to be found in the building.
2

1
You need another construction there: “between Jobs taking the stage” what? “Between” sets up
a construction when you’re comparing two things. I think of Stephen Sondheim saying, I have to
justify every word. It has to come off effortless although so much effort was put into it. That’s
the essence of art. People have to be able to look at it and be awed at how easy it seems even
though it’s nothing of the sort. It’s not easy to create something great. It’s about looking at each
word and being able to justify it and not getting lost in the words either. They interact with each
other, and you’re missing half a construction there, and it’ll throw things off. Suddenly it will
take people out because grammatically it’s off… This happens with me still, and this is why a
good editor is invaluable. They will point out things like that, and you’ll have to find a better
way of saying it while keeping the rhythm of it.
2
I think there is a way in criticism to do plot description where it comes off as criticism. There is
a way to describe something that you are relating what the story is or what the particular scene is
doing, while at the same time you are getting at what’s underlying everything and whether you
think it’s successful or not… I’m calling it “writing through the movie.” You’re giving the
experience of watching the movie again by writing through it beginning to end. It’s almost like
you’re giving the reader a sense of it inhabiting you and sharing that viewing experience in a
way. It’s trying to find that right balance in the word choice you use and the descriptions that you
use, getting the words to echo in between. The words or ideas underneath the words. Frankly I
thought that’s what you’re aiming for here.

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Both the operating system and the computer itself are closed off, incompatible with other
products and unable to be customized, perhaps not unlike Jobs himself. And yet Jobs speaks with
a vision of the computer’s personality and its ability to be a computer built around how people
actually think. Fassbender has a way of delivering every line with a charismatic, uplifting and
reassuring demeanor, even as he’s threatening and condescending. Always the PR mastermind,
he expertly deflects his ex-wife’s (Katherine Waterston) question about how he feels about his
daughter’s financial state of affairs by saying he believes Apple stock is undervalued. He
promises to ruin Hertzfeld’s career if he doesn’t get the voice demo working, and he justifies it
by saying with a wry snarl, “God sent his only son on a suicide mission, but we like him because
he made trees!”
Each of the three segments involves Jobs coordinating with his weary and overworked
micro-manager Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), politely acknowledging the journalist Joel
Pforzheimer (John Ortiz) and sparring and talking shop with his colleagues Steve Wozniak (Seth
Rogen) and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). In each segment he’s running late to the stage, he
confuses the names of two Andys who work for him, and he argues with his family before
conceding to offer them whatever money they need. Jobs is of the sort who has to argue and get
his perspective across, even if he decides to give in anyway.
You can see how Steve Jobs could function as a recurring Aaron Sorkin series, with
repeating jokes and lines and enough walking and talking to fill an entire season of The West
Wing, but Boyle places a certain rhythm to everything that allows each segment to flow fluidly.
1

1
You seem to align the movie much more with Sorkin more than anyone else as the most
powerful voice. You’re talking about one driving voice in Steve Jobs, and then there’s another
one in Sorkin, and it might be worth looking at Boyle and how they fit into that kind of
maelstrom. Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin are the eyes of their respective hurricanes, and I think
that’s an interesting critique.

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Like Jobs, Danny Boyle is a showman. Rather than the tight, digital aesthetic that the
previously attached David Fincher would’ve surely brought to the film, each of the three time
periods looks aesthetically evolved from the next. The first is the gritty documentary-realism
look, followed by a more operatic, artistic and colorful flavor, to finally the clean, luminous and
familiar look of Apple’s brand today.
1

Boyle and Sorkin also have a good way of bringing the same gravity to early discussions
about corporate and tech jargon to later conversations involving Jobs’s family melodrama. It
eventually ups the stakes by taking the backstage conflict and putting it in the forefront, with
Jobs and Wozniak screaming over the Apple 2 team right in front of the crowded hall of Apple
employees. And for all of Jobs’s ability to quote Bob Dylan or speak the praises of Alan Turing,
the film is at its best when a character like Jobs’s daughter can reduce his big ideas to the
simplest of metaphors, like that the iMac really just looks like Judy Jetson’s Easy Bake Oven.
Steve Jobs is Sorkinesque beyond measure, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with
Sorkin sticking to something that works
2
, especially when the ensemble performances are as
strong as they are here. Fassbender spars with everyone, and even when he loses his cool he
never drops the air of greatness he carries on his shoulders, constantly defending his own
greatness to anyone who would question it. Rogen graduates Woz from a playful pushover to a

1
These are very good descriptions, but you should probably also note that each section was shot
on different stock. That’s key to what you’re arguing there and what the film is doing. The
descriptions are really good, but it can also be connected to the technical things they’re doing
there. It’s a very intentional choice.
2
He does this rhythm of speech that I call “cocaine prattle,” they just yap yap yap. Sorkin used
to be an addict. That’s always personal to Sorkin, and it always seems to infect his writing, even
when he’s writing sober. I’m not saying necessarily bring up someone’s past, but it’s something
to keep in mind, because he does seem to be the driving force. I’d be interested to see the review
tease out that fictional character and the man writing him…Screenwriting is often a low art to a
lot of people. Most people don’t have a distinct voice, and he certainly does, and it parallels with
the characters he’s creating.

58
solemn and seasoned accomplice who has put up with Jobs’s insistence too many times. Winslet
is another powerhouse, seeing through Jobs’s ideologies even as she looks tired and defeated by
loyally and slavishly managing Jobs’s life. And Daniels is perfectly at home in Sorkin’s
dialogue, with both he and Fassbender so wonderfully combative and fiery.
1

Steve Jobs has become such a revered fixture of the 21
st
Century that Steve Jobs has
reignited discussions about the nature of accuracy in a biopic. It seemed easier to accept that
Mark Zuckerberg might be an asshole, but is now harder to imagine that Jobs was anything of a
contentious figure. Wozniak says near the end of the film that being a genius and being a good
person is not binary. By bending the truth of Jobs’s personality and heightening a discussion
around his ideologies, Sorkin’s script contends that in some ways it is.

1
I think a little more about the performances in some way would be welcome. Hone it to a point
where basically, you dash off the things you’re least interested in, and hone it more on the duel
between the Sorkin perspective and the Steve Jobs perspective, and how they parallel or mirror
each other.

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The Walk – As Edited by Keith Uhlich
There have been reports that people have vomited after witnessing the tight rope
sequence across the World Trade Center towers in Robert Zemeckis’s film The Walk. The fact is
it’s a bad trigger for Vertigo
1
sufferers, but the scene itself is not made to be a thrilling stunt. It
actually slows the film, away from the madcap whimsy of Zemeckis’s biopic and to something a
little more peaceful, tranquil and spiritual.
And yet for all the CGI wizardry and IMAX, 3D spectacle for which The Walk is earning
its buzz, Zemeckis never manages a moment as beautifully weightless as James Marsh does with
just still images and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” in the Oscar winning documentary Man
on Wire. The Walk is weighed down not only by its storytelling building up to the walk but in its
spectacle.
Philippe Petit managed a daring stunt upon the completion of the World Trade Center
towers in New York by dangling a wire across the 140 feet of the two buildings and walking
across, 110 stories off the ground. The performance was a coup, a beautiful demonstration
against the law, and the movie charts not only Petit’s madness but the pain and struggle it took to
sneak past the guards to make his art.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Petit, and although he’s not French and doesn’t quite look the
part, he’s a spunky song and dance man capable of embodying Petit’s goofy, circus charms and

1
I do see how you played around with language in interesting ways more than in the Steve Jobs
piece. One thing I liked was you capitalized “Vertigo” just as a little way of giving a shout out to
Hitchcock. That’s an example of how you might use a description in order to give a criticism.
It’s not quite a play on words here because you’re describing a state of mind, and yet in
capitalizing it, it brought to mind this other movie. Both of these movies are about obsession, so
it felt apt in a way that brought me in deeper to what this movie might be doing. Like you say, it
was unconscious, and yet there it is. And now you can see how interpretation varies. Intentions
are intentions, and then there’s the work itself. You have to allow for that wide span of reaction
that will come from that.

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showmanship. He’s also perfectly insufferable, narrating his life story from atop the Statue of
Liberty no less, the towers idling in the background as though 9/11 never happened.
1

It’s the laziest sort of storytelling, in which not only does Zemeckis opt to tell us Petit’s
story rather than show us, Gordon-Levitt seems all too eager to do so and lays the whimsy of
becoming a wire walker on thick. Gordon-Levitt butts up against the equally galling accent of
Ben Kingsley as Petit’s Czech mentor, and the early chapters of the film range from cheesy to
grating.
“You’re doing too much,” Kingsley’s character says to Petit about how to be sincere in
performance. “Do nothing!” Zemeckis would’ve been good to heed this advice, for as we wait
for the 3-D to make itself useful during the walk sequence, Zemeckis throws juggling pins and
balls at the camera and has Petit showboat or spin a globe to keep things alive.
2

Things liven up a bit when Zemeckis switches to caper mode, diving into how Petit spies
on the Twin Tower construction crews, builds his team of accomplices, and tries to rig his
equipment while avoiding detection. Man on Wire did this wonderfully, donning a style that
borrowed from Errol Morris but had energy all its own. The Walk suffers from a few stock
characters like a flaky stoner and some negative nellies constantly telling Petit it’s impossible.

1
I’m reacting to this as someone who likes The Walk a lot. The voiceover is actually not quite
the tell, don’t show thing that people are saying. It’s putting you in this naturally whimsical
man’s head. I think it’s a psychological technique. His interior monologue defines what the
whole film is, which is very playful. I think 9/11 is in there, especially right at the end in the pass
that says you can come and visit forever. Anyone watching the movie would know what
happened to those buildings ultimately.
2
The Steve Jobs review seems much more sculpted, and The Walk review seems more rough
edged. It’s struggling to find a point of interest here because my interpretation is that this film
did not quite interest you and you were struggling with that. You then took it upon yourself to
find these interesting turns of phrases to make things easy. The basic line by line text is a bit
more sculpted than the whole, whereas with Steve Jobs the whole is more sculpted than the line
by line.

61
The Walk also doesn’t get inside Petit’s art as strongly as Man on Wire does. Marsh knew
that the artistry of Petit’s act was in the coup, defying the law but in a peaceful, beautiful way.
The Walk is all about the thrill and spiritual sensation of its major set piece. The camera
throughout the movie teases the sensation of staring downward until finally it cranes overhead
and sees to infinity. Its movements around Petit are slow and feel treacherous, but only to the
extent that we sense each of Petit’s steps and feel comfortable in his shoes.
As James Marsh accepted his Oscar, Petit joined him on stage and said, “Thank you to
the Academy for continuing to believe in magic,” performing a slight of hand trick and then
balancing Marsh’s Oscar upside down on his chin. It was an unexpected moment of levity that
immediately deflated the stuffy airiness from the Oscar ceremony. The Walk is a movie that aims
to be full of those moments, whimsical and endearing to the point of being insufferable. At least
up on that wire he shuts up for a moment.
1

1
You come up with an excellent last line. I always am a fan of good kickers and good openers. I
can detect a little more disinterest. You just want to flick this thing away, and that’s why the last
line has the power that it does. That’s like the knife going in, completely.

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Chapter 3: Peter Labuza
In the summer 2012 I applied to Indiewire’s Critic’s Academy program for a chance to
attend and report on the New York Film Festival. I didn’t make the cut, but one of the eight
young critics who did was Peter Labuza. This bothered me because, I had already heard of him.
Surely he had already “made it.”
In 2012, Labuza was getting his big break. In February of that year he was “discovered”
by critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who published his video essay about the film Certified Copy on
Indiewire’s Press Play blog. Since then he’s written for Variety, Reverse Shot and The Film
Stage. In July of the same year, Labuza started a podcast called The Cinephiliacs, interviewing
critics such as Seitz, Glenn Kenny, Bilge Ebiri and Keith Uhlich about criticism and the movies.
His podcast is now more than 90 episodes deep, and within the last few months alone, Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have all been his guests on the show.
Beyond that, Labuza already has a vast knowledge of film history, looking more like a
film historian on par with Bordwell or David Thomson than your average critic. He earned his
B.A. and M.A. in Film Studies at Columbia University working under legendary film critic and
academic Andrew Sarris. His Masters Thesis was published into a book in 2014, Approaching
the End: Imagining the Apocalypse in American Film. I finally caught up with him in his
graduate office on the USC campus, where he is a Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Studies at the
Cinematic Arts School.
And if I really want to feel inadequate, we’re both the same age.
But part of the reason for doing this project in the first place was to be able to talk to
critics like Labuza and pick their brains. Oddly enough, that’s exactly what he had in mind when
he started The Cinephiliacs.

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“There's a little bit of selfishness,” Labuza said. “You mean I can sit down in a room
alone for two hours with Kent Jones or Dave Kehr? I can Skype with Adrian Martin about things
I want to ask about? I get to hang out with all the cool people! Who doesn't want to do that?”
Given the title of his podcast, I asked Labuza, what is a cinephile? But if it’s anyone, it’s
him. He’s the type of critic who will write about Magic Mike XXL and invoke Richard Dyer’s
history of 35mm film stock in order to analyze how the film looks at black bodies. (Labuza
2015) He can carry on an in-depth conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum on his podcast about
the long lost Holy Grail of a Jacques Rivette film, Out 1, fully acknowledging that the audience
for that sort of conversation is going to be fairly limited.
But Labuza’s writing and podcast are cultivating a true community of people deeply,
deeply committed to film. And by way of interviewing all these critics, he’s creating an archive
for how future generations will look back on the early 21
st
century in film criticism. Yes, the
discussion can often be obscure and so far removed from the mainstream of what we typically
deem “culturally relevant,” but as Labuza reiterated time and again, it’s the quality of the
community reading your work, not the quantity.

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Full Interview with Peter Labuza
Would you consider yourself more of an "academic" or a "critic?"
I try to blend that line. There's a long, weird history between criticism and academics.
Criticism starts in the 1910s, but then you have someone like one of my teachers at Columbia,
Andrew Sarris, who was an academic but at the same time was always a film critic and always
wrote. One of the other professors there was Richard Peña. He was the programmer for Film
Society of Lincoln Center. It's not criticism, but it's one foot in the community and one foot out.
So, where do I put myself? I see myself as part of a tradition of wanting to be part of
academic writing and have more rigor than when you say "critic," unless if you say "critic" is
defined by the more literary aspect of how you write being very important, and often focused on
the ideas. That's why academic writing is often seen as very dry or boring, although that's not
always the case. You can do both. So I try and bring a side of that to both, and even when I sit
down to write, I don't think, this is going to be an academic piece versus a critic piece, unless
there are footnotes. That's going to be my biggest difference. My hope is that I can toe that line,
so that's why I see it as two worlds in competition with each other. But I feel that the more they
speak to each other, the better they become.
Is there a difference in style that you approach when you write?
It might just be about word count honestly. That makes a difference. Right now I'm doing
a DVD column for a Canadian fashion blog, 500 words a week. First, I know the audience that's
reading that fashion blog is not the same that's reading Film Comment or a peer reviewed
published journal that's under five different pay walls.
I picked that because, well one it pays, which is nice, and in this industry is not
necessarily a given. But two, I see it as "exercise." I really dive down and dig down in these
primary documents, and then I need to take a break. Okay, I just watched this movie, I have to

65
write 500 words on it, and I need to sell it to a general audience. It's almost like I'm exercising a
different muscle because I need to think generally. I do always think about it as a muscle
metaphor; I've been working on my glutes, and now I need to do a little leg work.
Anyone knows when you're writing criticism, it comes to, "know your audience." You're
not going to write the same piece for the same institutions no matter what, and it doesn't matter if
it's two different types of newspapers. Even those two newspapers have different audiences.
Why did you get into academia? Was it because you wanted to become a critic and you
thought this was a way you could get into the field, or did you have different aspirations?
I started very early. 2004 was when I started my blog, and that writing was definitely
terrible, as one's is in high school. But I thought I would just start writing on the Internet because
it was something I could set up for free, and I would just put my thoughts out there. But I
decided if I wanted to be a film critic, I'll do this.
Then it was, I need to go to school. Okay, I'm going to do a degree in film studies. I
thought that would be good. I could learn the history of film and how to write better. A lot of the
humanities programs in general, you learn more knowledge but you learn how to better articulate
yourself. If I want to be a film critic, I do a degree in film studies. But of course that's where you
start to notice separations.
I graduated in 2011, but we're still in a post-recession age, and the amount of jobs out
there, which is still true and will probably always be true for the rest of time is, you don't get
your start by getting a full time position in film writing. You freelance a couple of pieces here,
and you always have a day job. I still know critics who for years still keep a day job because
they'd rather just write on the side.

66
After I got out of school, what I missed in film writing was the high intensity of
engagement that came from being in a group of people working really closely with texts and now
with historical primary resources. There are some good critics today who really do their research
in order to do their work, but there's no incentive to do it. You're totally on your own to do it,
while in the academic world it's incentivized to think slow. We recognize the great critics do
work slowly, do really engage a lot, do watch all the films by a certain director before they write
the piece on it and try and read a lot of the criticism, but there's no incentive to do that.
Do you feel that having that academic background is essential for a lot of critics? I come
from a journalism background, which is a different world.
Yeah, but in journalism you're taught to know the facts of your story, right? Maybe it's
the "logic is sufficient but not necessary" clause. A lot of my favorite writers seem to be very
aware of the history they're talking about, but it's never necessary. You can write a great piece on
anything, like a personal reflection piece, and you're putting yourself in the story, and there's
your experience engaging in the outside world.
Criticism as a genre is such a weird thing, right? What defines great criticism is very,
very loose because some people argue the most important thing is the ideas you're bringing out,
others say it's all about the turns of phrases, like if you're wrong about how you articulated a film
and you get facts wrong but the writing is good, does that matter? I don't know. I tend to fall on
the other side. I would like to see the piece that makes me aware. You never want the writer to
show off and say, "Look at all the research I did." But if you're reading a good piece, you want to
see a certain engagement with the ideas.
A piece a lot of people always cite as one of the great film writing pieces of the last few
years was a piece called "Intolerance" by Kent Jones in Film Comment. It responded to the

67
comments Quentin Tarantino made to the scholar Henry Lewis Gates regarding how John Ford
was a racist. Kent's piece went through Ford's work and asked, "Where does this idea come from
that John Ford is a racist?" He certainly doesn't say equivocally that Ford wasn't a racist, because
the guy certainly had racist attitudes; he was brought up in the South in the 1910s and '20s.
(Jones 2013) But there's certainly more complexity here than this didactic, new left comment that
was being made. Kent's piece was heavily researched, and it's funny because the Comment's
piece came out seven months after Tarantino said this and everyone wrote pieces saying,
"Tarantino's wrong about this." He clearly went back and watched every John Ford film and then
a bunch of other Westerns, all looking at this issue of race in Native American cinema. He
needed to make sure he was right in looking at this point.
What are some things you keep in mind when writing criticism?
Number One is always clarity. There's nothing worse than getting your reader lost, and
that could be in terms of your prose, your ideas, or the historical context that you're trying to
address. If I'm writing a piece and I say, it really responds to Zizeckian Dialectical Materialism,
and I don't explain, unless I assume my audience knows what Zizeckian Dialectical Materialism
is (I don't even know what that means), the point being I think clarity is always such a virtue.
I think having a point of perspective really gets lost. The bad criticism we make fun of,
it's the stuff of adjectives. It's the stuff of Peter Travers at Rolling Stone saying, "rip roaring fun
adventure thrill ride." You can say all these things and not tell me a single thing about what is
this movie.
A mentor taught me this: description not judgment. Often just describing a film itself is a
very tricky thing. Saying what a scene is doing, what the actors are doing, what the camera is
doing. This comes to the "show, don't tell." If you describe to me how the camera moves in

68
relation to the actors, you're almost telling me everything I need to know in terms of how this
film feels. It will be naturally built in to your description. I really care about getting description
down.
Historical context can be dependent on the thing. I was really inspired when I saw Magic
Mike XXL in what was my favorite piece I wrote this year. There was a sequence in the film that
I wrote really dealt with how black bodies are shown. Race in film is not something I'm
particularly drawn to write about, but I was really fascinated by how the visual lighting on these
black bodies looked with the digital cinematography. I did some brief research into whiteness on
35mm film stock and how 35mm really emphasized purity of white bodies as an angelic form
and socially trained us to see that as beauty, and then how digital photography doesn't emphasize
the same color. Steven Soderbergh, the DP of that film, shot that on RED cameras, which are
really into blues and reds and not as much yellows like film stock is. I didn't expect that piece to
go into historical context, but it felt natural to the point that I wanted to get.
Whatever matters to the argument you're trying to make...you never want to include more
than you need to make your points. Part of clarity is breadth. It's a lost value. Part of the reason I
wanted to start doing that DVD column is I've been reading a lot of the capsules that Dave Kehr
and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader. There's something so profound about
being able to capture the essence of a film in 200 words. That's not to say that's the end-all be-all
of criticism, but younger writers keep expanding. They have more thoughts, but they don't have a
hierarchy of these thoughts. I found less and less that I want to write the BFI Monograph of 100
pages on films that inspire me and I'd rather write the 500 word piece that captures everything I
feel, and being able to make those singular word choices that open up an entire avenue.

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There's a Mark Twain quote, "I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote
you a long one."
I get emails from people in their 20s asking me to review their writing, and they write
1400 words but they make all their points in 600. Recognizing that thought is such a difficult
thing when you think that awesome paragraph you wrote? It has no purpose. It doesn't say or tell
anything, or maybe if it does, it's not important to the piece at hand that you're trying to write.
How would you define your own writing style or voice?
I feel like I always ask that on the podcast, and yet I feel like everyone could articulate
my voice, but to ask me to articulate my own voice?
More and more I do freeform. I just start writing. My first paragraph I always know I'm
going to throw out. I'm setting up the space in which I'm writing in. Then I know I can start
writing my piece, and these are the points I want to get through and start covering. When I write
freeform, I'm sort of discovering the piece I want to write through it. I have less time to write
about films outside of the things I do for assignments, but when I sit down to write I'm trying to
figure out what's really sparking me. Near the end of my first draft when I'm getting to my
second to last paragraph, I suddenly figure out, "This is what this piece is really about." Then I
go back and write the entire piece based on that point. I throw out the first paragraph, where it's
just setting up the atmosphere, those points will come back in. People can find those otherwise.
But it's this scared thing because you can never be so bold. Then when you come to the end, it's a
process of rewriting and rewriting based on what needs to be the core takeaway from the piece
you're writing.
For me I think more and more, if you look at the stuff I've put on Letterboxd, those are
the diary pieces I write because I have an urge and have no outlet. There are a couple of things I

70
just really want to say about this film. I don't want to cover it completely, but I noticed this, and
this is interesting to me, and I just would like people to know this as well. It's closer to Manny
Farber, but I think he could write his short pieces and capture the entirety of a film. I'm more
interested in pointing out a little piece of it.
This is the weirdest metaphor, but criticism is often like repainting a painting. Good
criticism is almost like redrawing the painting, except it's what you emphasize that's different
from the original. So if you put a little more blue because you want people to notice that blue, or
if you blow up one of the objects a little stronger, this is what you're doing in criticism. You're
recreating the art work in a different medium, but you're also changing it because you're
changing it in a way that emphasizes it in a way that the artist might've put in there but is hiding.
I just like to blow up little parts of the painting, want it to be a little more emphasized, and that's
what really excites me when I'm writing.
What do you think is the job of the critic?
Let's separate film reviewing from film criticism, which I think are two separate worlds.
There are people I think are really good film reviewers. This is what Roger Ebert was really good
at. He was one of those critics that you wanted to read before you saw the movie. He wasn't
going to give spoilers, but he told you what would be interesting and why that movie would be
worth seeing, and he really nailed that tone. That's what made him so phenomenal and made him
so inspiring.
He also did good criticism work. Criticism I feel is a discussion between you, your reader
and your text. I often go into movies blind. I recently saw two French films from the 1930s, but I
didn't know anything about the particulars. After I saw them I wanted to read everything I could
about these films by critics who are looking at these things, because even as a reader I want to

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have a discussion with these people and see if it reflected what I maybe missed and how they
interpreted certain scenes.
So I feel the job of the critic is to engage with an audience's thoughts after watching a
film more than seeing it before the film. Some criticism is meant to be read before seeing a film,
but criticism is a way to keep a thought process going in your head to engage with others who
are seeing this film. When we get out of a movie, we go out for a beer and talk about these films.
We're engaging in, "What did you think of that performance? Did this sequence work?"
So I like to think of criticism as continuing the discussion and trying to bring different
viewpoints that a single individual spectator cannot have, and it's the collectiveness that creates
the new movie.
I once heard of a statement that reviewing is for telling you if you should buy something
whereas criticism is for someone who has already experienced something. I used to think
that was reductive, but the way you've described reviewing and criticism is interesting.
This is the audience question, right? I'm still trying to figure out whether to see the new
Guillermo Del Toro film, Crimson Peak. And we as cinephiles maybe look down at the
reviewers. We know what we want to see, right? The average person, it's like "fuck!" I look at
what's playing at a theater and I have 18 choices...I liked Steven Spielberg's last one, Jessica
Chastain's in this one...Which ones of these are good? That's a service in itself.
In the same way we don't separate from high art movies and low art movies, we shouldn't
separate from high art criticism and low art criticism. In a way, being a film reviewer is such a
trickier prospect in a way. This is what I'm trying to do for my DVD column. The A.V. Club has
a segment called "Watch This." 400 word blurbs, they choose a theme and you recommend a
movie. In those I assume my audience has not seen this film. I want to tell them why they would

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want to see this film. I just wrote about this 1954, Robert Mitchum, psycho Western,
called Track of the Cat, set on a mountain, where he fights this black panther that's never actually
seen. My pitch is basically, this is a really weird movie, you never see the panther, and I give
certain facts, like it's written by A.I. Bezzerides, the guy who wrote Kiss Me Deadly, so if you
like that film you'll like this one. So that itself is a tricky form of criticism, because it's not me
assuming you've seen this film and can really dive in. But in the same way that we talked about
how film criticism and academic bleeds together, film reviewing and criticism bleeds.
Do you feel you have an influence? Do you have a gauge of your audience when you're
writing?
This is what social media is so good about. I know who I'm engaging with specifically.
Sometimes you know in this day and age how many people really read your piece. Like on
Letterboxd, I know I'm writing to about 50 people who are my friends. Strangely, that Magic
Mike XXL piece blew up. I didn't write it for a general audience; I wrote it for people who I
thought would engage in terms of how film fits into this question.
When I moved here to Los Angeles, the people who I became friends with are the people
who I already engaged with on social media, and now we can grab a beer together instead of
having a beer separately. So I see it as a friendly engagement. And the people who really care to
engage with you are most important.
Now, there are those commenters... I'm one of those people who can't help but read every
comment I get. It's bad, but I just have to. White male critics who get the most malicious
comments are possibly deserving of it in a way. I got comments on my review of Interstellar for
The Film Stage. I'm actually really proud of the review and I think it gets into why I don't like
Christopher Nolan films, but if you look at the way I wrote it, it gets into a little glibness. If you

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look at the negativity that responded in those comments, they responded to that glibness. If you
engage seriously, your commenters will be serious.
When Dave Kehr ran his blog for many years, I go back and read the comments. It's the
level of people who are engaging with it. It's Kent Jones, Glenn Kenny, Jonathan Rosenbaum,
and other bloggers I don't know but who get into it with the same erudition. It's so exciting to see
people take a comment section seriously and to try and engage not just with Dave Kehr the
writer, but the community.
That's what I try to do with Twitter. Lots of people follow me, but I keep doing it because
I really care about the 300 people who want to engage with me on a daily basis about movies.
How did you build that network of film lovers and critics?
Number 1: it's all luck. Number 2: the kindness and generosity of strangers. I graduated
college in 2011, and I was still writing pretty much just for my blog. That was it. I was engaging
on Twitter, and a few critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and Glenn Kenny were following me back. I
then got very lucky. I was very inspired by the work Matt Seitz and Kevin B. Lee were doing
with video essays, and I said I wanted to do a video essay on Certified Copy, the Abbas
Kiarostami film. I put it on the Internet, Matt saw it on his Twitter feed, clicked through it,
watched it, and he said "Why don't we put this on Press Play and start working on your next
one?"
As anyone who will tell you, there's an entire generation of critics who were discovered
by Matt, Keith Uhlich for one. He's always searching out for young new talent. As many people,
I was incredibly blessed.
I was incredibly lucky to be in New York where a lot of these people know each other.
About 70 percent of the people who have been on the podcast, I met in real life before I ever

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asked them to do the podcast. They knew me, we had talked movies both online and in person,
so I was lucky that the network was very open.
Also, being personable, a nice person and to be interested in others. I think there's a
generation of critics who think it's most important to get their voice out. But my project with the
podcast was, I wasn't as fascinated by my own voice as I was fascinated with the voice of all
these other people whose work had inspired me in some way and were doing something way
more interesting. I wanted to figure out what they were doing, how and why.
I got lucky no one had really done this audio podcast. There were a few interviews with
critics here and there, but none with the breadth of scholarship and the publicity I was able to
push through my guests. I think that openness to wanting to hear others, the fact that someone
younger wants to come and listen to you is always a generous moment that you have some
wisdom to give.
Now I also wanted to establish my own voice, but finding a balance is important. If you
read my writing, I cite a lot. Dana Stevens of Slate, she sees a film, closes every binder and
doesn't want to hear anyone else talk about it at all. But for the type of audience she's addressing
she wants to be the person who just is articulating her own view, and then enter the discussion.
Because I don't write for a major publication, I'm not the first one writing about a film, and I
want to build a map of where people are falling on this film, and what can I contribute to this
conversation? Bring in the people who make the interesting points. I like being in the middle of
the conversation instead of staying on the outside of it.
How has the podcast helped develop your career?
Most of my freelance has come because of the podcast. I got very close to a very
prominent job but ended up being second. When I was in the elevator today some random person

75
who I’d never seen in my life said they enjoyed my podcast. It certainly helped establish my
name.
One of the most important things for me was I wanted to meet all these people. I thought
these people were fascinating, all at the top of their game. They seemed to know everything and
engage in everything. There's a little bit of selfishness. You mean I can sit down in a room alone
for two hours with Kent Jones or Dave Kehr? I can Skype with Adrian Martin about things I
want to ask about? I get to hang out with all the cool people! Who doesn't want to do that?
Part of what I'm realizing now that I'm more in an academic circle is, this is going to be a
nice archive one day for how we study the history of film criticism. Otis Ferguson never did any
interviews, James Agee did some, Manny Farber has certainly, but some day someone will want
to study the history of film criticism in this era, and I'm going to have this amazing primary
resource archive. There's a good social value I've created. But the project needs to be finished at
some point. It's got to reach a conclusion. It will never be “finished” finished, but this is a good
social service.
In the same way it's helped me find my criticism, it can help a lot of young writers.
They'll say, “Oh my god, Matt Singer is my favorite writer about superhero movies and nerddom
stuff. What does he do? What's his process?” I think there's something so important about the
interviews being audio instead of text based that really helps people because it shows people
thinking in the moment, and I think the spirit of the air you can only capture that way instead of
in the text.
That selfish aspect is certainly the thought process I went through in developing this thesis.
The earlier interviews I did were more general enthusiasm things, but now that I've had
certain "celebrity" critics, I'm more interested in the oddities and specialties. Very few people

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knew who Lea Jacobs was, this professor at UW Madison, but she had written this amazing book
about how to look at visual rhythm in film that's becoming really influential in my academic
work. If I can get Lea to sit down and talk about this, this is an idea I think people need to know,
and if people hear about it, it's going to inspire a lot of people in a new way.
The podcast is called The Cinephiliacs. Do you feel cinephilia is alive and well? Is it any
better or worse than in the past?
Cinephilia has been around, but the question is how is it changing in the new age? With
digital media, is it that different from what it was? I took a seminar analyzing how it has evolved.
Cinephilia suggests a difference from the normal movie going population, right? You're different
in some way. You're not just someone who goes to the movies; you're a cinephile. You do more
than the average person who goes to the movies. And if you look at film history with so much
changing, everyone has Netflix, but not everyone has Hulu+ with the Criterion Collection.
Everyone writes a blog, but how do you get your blog to stand out?
The question that defines cinephilia always used to be a question of access. The reason
film became huge in Europe in the '40s and '50s was the large influx of films all at once that
allowed people to devour six films in a day instead of all these films to be seen over weeks and
weeks. The question of access is still a very important question, but in general it's gone. There
has been a change in that cinephilia used to be about receivership. What have you seen, what
have you acquired? You used to take your book of Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema and
you crossed off each film title.
There's a stronger question now though with cinephilia, there's a community, and it's
what are you bringing as an individual to this community? How are you adding to it? It's not as
much what you're taking out of it. Everyone can take anything out of it, but what are you putting

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out there? These could be very different ways. You could be a blog or podcast writer, there are
certain websites of ill-repute of distributions of things that aren't available, like torrent sites. The
way people define themselves in cinephilia is what are you contributing to this project, in a way
that a lot of people are now changing from consumers to active producers.
What are some of the qualities of a cinephile?
Male. Mostly white. Very pasty.
There are questions of the role of the cinephile who sits in the dark, is very anti-social
and doesn't talk to people, lives with their mom in the basement. I think that image is dying
away.
To actually answer your question, there's a sense of really wanting to engage and seeing
this as more than something you do just for fun. This is serious, and it doesn't mean it can't be
fun, but you're engaging seriously. Every time I miss a 35mm print of something, there's this
little thing in the back of my neck saying I'm screwing up, or I'm not doing this right. But if I
said that to anyone else, they'd say I was a crazy person.
You meet all different personality types. I think of someone like Farran Smith Nehme.
Farran writes for a business magazine mostly, but she's also just a mom with three kids who
watches most of her movies on TCM. She's this very mom-like person, and she's lovely in that
way. You just want to hang out with her because she's just a fun person. Kent Jones is very quiet
and self-astute. Philip Lopate, he's been one of my closest mentors for years, but he doesn't even
call himself a critic. He calls himself an essayist who has happened to write a lot about movies.
A lot of people want to listen and engage. But the ones I appreciate are the ones who don't just
want to engage with themselves; they want to engage with everyone else around them. That's
why I have them on in an audio interview. I want to get a feel for how they feel at the moment.

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How do you balance academic life and your career as a film critic, and what are some of
the challenges of freelancing?
Balance is like being on a unicycle that's on fire with lots of bowling pins thrown in the
air and also you're in a wind machine, and maybe you're on the moon.
Balance is a tough question. Freelance is a gig. It does not pay my bills. It pays for the
nice steak dinner for my girlfriend. Occasionally you get a nice healthy check here or there. The
people who make a living off solely freelancing, I'd want to look at their spreadsheets. People
like Keith Uhlich are freelancing, but he has the TV writing opportunity at The Hollywood
Reporter. I certainly don't have one of those. I don't have time to establish that relationship and
get the really expensive pieces.
USC pays all my bills. This is my full time career, and I have certain responsibilities I
have to fulfill. If I don't submit a freelancing gig, I don't get paid. But if I fail at my teaching
duties or my classes, I can get fired or lose my fellowship. These are my primary duties. Always
I see the academic work is first, the freelancing is second, and then there's this podcast. I could
say, "That's it" tomorrow. It's always important to keep priorities. You talk to any freelancers,
and they will prioritize some publications over others.
I'd love to know what are the moments of a writer who gets paid but then decides to do a
piece for free. Those are often the pieces the writer cares the most about. That's the piece they
know they had to get out of their system. That's the Magic Mike XXL piece. Although I should've
pitched that somewhere, but if I had not written that a couple days after I saw it, I needed to get it
out of my system.
You also need to prioritize a social life. Sometimes people say don't study film because
you can learn that anytime. Learn everything else because that's the stuff that will help you

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engage in the world. I think it's important that I sit through so many films, but it's also really
important to be engaged in the world. I read a lot of politics and economics to see how markets
work. A.V. Club once a month asks writers to post what they're reading, and Ignatiy
Vishnevetsky, probably one of my favorite critics close to my age, was reading a sociology text
on the history of some sort of office culture in the 1980s, and then a work by Christopher
Marlowe, the German author, and I thought that was so revealing to how he thinks as a writer.
He doesn't need to read just other film criticism or history of Hollywood that will help as a
writer, but he thinks this other stuff will help him engage, whether it's poetry, whether it's
Marxist criticism or whether it's sociology. These are things that will help me think better about
what I want to write about.
What are some other practical tips you have for people to get their work out there?
I don't say to never write for free, but don't do it unless you're getting something beyond
"exposure." I think this exposure quality is very dangerous. A great example for many years was
Reverse Shot. They did not ever once pay their writers, although now they do. I wrote four pieces
for them, but only one was published. One went through four rounds of editing, and then
Michael Koresky, the best editor I've ever had, said this piece was not good enough, and he
didn't publish it. That experience itself to have been edited, and it was the most extensive editing
I've ever been through, that was so useful and worth my time.
If you're not going to get paid, what are you going to get out of it? If it's the piece you
have to write, that's okay, but I think it's dangerous to not want to be paid for the effort or work
unless you can justify it. Don't let the site justify why you should write for them. If that exposure
is really important, then go for it. I always like to say, "Who's the editor that I get to work with?"

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Justify to yourself why you're doing it, and if you can't and are wishy-washy, there's another site
where you can do it because the world is so big.
What gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
I like a finished piece. You write to have written. As any sort of person, you love to see
the responses and engage in a discussion and conversation, and when I write, I discover the piece
I really want to write. That itself creates a certain adrenaline and a rush, and there's an
excitement to share what you're discovering, especially if you know and think it's worth it.
Of course every few years you go through that process of looking back at your writing
and you pull out your hair. It's having those moments of knowing when your writing is good and
knowing when it's bad is really hard. I only recently started having that. I know when I've written
a really good piece. I have that revelation of what it meant for me to have done a good piece
versus a bad piece. Most stuff now I know, "Yep, that's a solid, okay piece." But when I've
written something special, that's really exciting to me. The one great thing about social media is
being then able to engage with everyone else and see how they come at those things.
That's why I want to hang out with cinephiles. I just want to go to the bar, get drunk and
debate these movies until the end of time.

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Peter Labuza Takeaways – Breadth is a lost value
Michael Phillips said to be wary of writing an “officious throat clearing” paragraph to
open your review, the sort of contextual piece of scene setting that does little in terms of giving
criticism, is not interesting to write and is even less interesting to read. Peter Labuza however
says it’s okay to write those paragraphs, so long as you know going in you’ll throw them away.
The hard part is being so bold as to actually feel you can get rid of them.
Speaking with Labuza gave me the courage to believe that if I’m not yet writing for a
broad, general audience at a national newspaper, I don’t have to do the legwork for the reader.
The Internet is available for people who need to find who’s in the movie, who directed it, or
something else a “reviewer” might provide (Phillips called it having enough of the “furniture”).
All that is important, and as Labuza said, it boils down to knowing your audience. But if I don’t
have to concern myself with the table setting, I can focus more on the criticism itself. I can pour
more details and description into how and why a movie works instead of whether it’s worth your
time and money.
My review of Suffragette was a good case study. Labuza recommended outright that my
review’s first paragraph could easily be cut. My second paragraph, Labuza said, was the far more
engaging one and a typical act of burying the lede. Labuza often gets emails from other aspiring
critics asking him to look over their reviews, and his response tends to always be the same.
“They write 1400 words but they make all their points in 600,” Labuza said. “That
awesome paragraph you wrote? It has no purpose. It doesn't say or tell anything, or maybe if it
does, it's not important to the piece at hand that you're trying to write.”
Labuza says writing with breadth is a lost value. We have so much we want to say when
we’re young writers, but we fail to try and contain all those thoughts into words that carry their
own weight and each serve a purpose. Keith Uhlich said it was a need to justify every word, and

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some of Labuza’s favorite writers, including Manny Farber, Dave Kehr and Jonathan
Rosenbaum, wrote capsule reviews that could capture an entire film in as little as 150 words.
The Suffragette review is little over 500 words, but how many of even those few actually
contain substance? Labuza said the best sentences of mine were the ones in which I “dig for the
heart.” They’re the ones that really get at the film’s style and reach the level of specificity to
which Phillips was referring. But while Phillips admitted writing about acting is always fairly
tricky, Labuza gave some strong practical advice on how to dig in. Don’t say Carrie Mulligan is
excellent, but say what physical attributes she’s exerting that characterize her performance. Put
things in comparison of one another, for instance saying that Suffragette’s soapbox elements are
reminiscent of the speeches throughout Selma.
Labuza likens movie criticism to repainting a painting. It’s your job to accurately recreate
the experience for the viewer, but you have the ability to call more attention to the painting’s
blue notes or to blow up a particular figure. Highlighting and amplifying is arguably more
essential to criticism than declaring something good or bad.
“A mentor taught me this: Description not judgment,” Labuza said. “If you describe to
me how the camera moves in relation to the actors, you're almost telling me everything I need to
know in terms of how this film feels. It will be naturally built in to your description.”

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Suffragette – As Edited by Peter Labuza
Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette is most relevant today as a piece of historical fiction because
issues of women’s rights are in 2015 as prevalent and significant as they were in 1912 London.
It’s the slightly fictionalized story of English working women who took up civil disobedience in
order to pressure the government to give women the vote.
1

Should women be allowed to vote? Of course. The answer is so obvious that even the
film provides scant arguments against it.
2
Suffragette could better advance the discussion of
women’s rights in 2015 if it had more to say regarding the debate and nuances of women’s rights
issues in 1912. Suffragette is more a soapbox than a profound piece of modern feminism.
3
And
while it has strong performances and competent filmmaking, it’s even lacking as a stirring piece
of dramatic historical fiction.
Carrie Mulligan is excellent (although what else is new) as Maud Watts,
4
an uneducated
mother working in the laundry trade in London. She happens across her colleague Violet Miller
(Anne-Marie Duff) smashing West End windows while calling for the vote for women, and she’s
reluctantly pulled into the fray. Maud testifies at a parliamentary hearing in place of Violet
regarding the pitiful working conditions at the laundry, and the police associate Maud with the

1
Remember that thing I said about dropping that first paragraph? Your first paragraph isn't
giving you anything.
2
This is such a better opener. It's journalism, so your nut graf, right? You're not leading with your
lede. This is the thing that makes me want to read this piece.
3
I would try and bring out how is it creating its soapbox elements. I assume there are a lot of
speeches and rabble rousing. The film that this review is reminding me of is Selma. If you put those
things in comparison, it makes me clearer of what this film is.
4
Here’s an idea: "Carrie Mulligan once again plays a soft-eyed, brownish hair, timid girl with a
strong personality." This tells me a lot about her character and the way she performs. If you give us
the physical descriptions and adjectives of that performance, it will tell us whether a performance is
good or bad. You don't need to tell me Carrie Mulligan is excellent if you tell me what she's doing as
a performer.

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other suffragettes (including Helena Bonham Carter and a rapid cameo from Meryl Streep),
which is a different term from the non-violent suffragists.
1

It isn’t long before Maud comes around to the cause, despite how it estranges her from
her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and her young son. Sonny is a character who isn’t as
monstrous as some of the other male figures in the film, who range from having severe male-
gaze/ownership issues to being flat out sexual abusers, but Sonny isn’t quite sympathetic to the
cause either. The only meaningful male character with principles of any sort is the police officer
played by Brendan Gleeson. He unblinkingly and calmly reasons with Maud that no one cares
for her or her activism, and that she’s only being used as a pawn. From Gleeson, the scene hits
heavy, and he passively upholds the law without politics in mind and even calls attention to the
barbaric treatment of female prisoners later in the film.
Suffragette stands out from the crop of most Hollywood movies simply as an example of
fiction, historical or otherwise, that allow this many women on screen at once. We see them
plotting attacks and even running away from explosions. Suffragette even takes on something of
a caper vibe, but it lacks a strong sense of suspense to carry along the action. Gavron resorts
instead to a lot of shaky cam, naturalistic filmmaking that doesn’t go the distance in terms of
creating mood.
2

During the closing credits, Gavron closes Suffragette with a roll of major countries and
the year in which they gave women the right to vote, ending with Saudi Arabia promising

1
How do we deal with plot summary? Sometimes you just have to shove it into a paragraph. If you
can shred it into the rest of the piece somehow without necessarily having to just sit there and tell it. I
like to talk about speed with writing, pacing and tempo. Plot summaries slow the tempo down so
much.
2
As a general audience person I think I know what you're getting at. As a film audience, I'm not sure
what's making it that way. Saying something is "absent" or missing an element, that gets into an
idealized version. It's always important to avoid talking about what films lack and attack them for
what they do instead of what they don't do.

85
women the right this year.
1
There is still work to be done, and if nothing else, Suffragette is still a
rousing story capable of getting more and more women to speak up.
2

1
You need to dig for the heart, and the places where you do hit the heart are your best sentences
here. The closing credits tells me a lot about this film and how this film sees its style and what its
point is. Always, always, you gotta go for the heart.
2
Don’t ask me about conclusions, but if something sounds generic, that means you need to figure out
something else.

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Chapter 4: Peter Rainer
Peter Rainer has been a film critic for over 30 years, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize in criticism in 2010, and he was the President of the National Society of Film Critics, today
serving as the critic for the Christian Science Monitor. But at the start of his book, Rainer on
Film, he confesses that he once questioned whether he was even in the right profession.
“Where were the movies with the richness of say, great novels?” Rainer wrote. “It was
important for me to know that movies could be great in that way. If the essence of what I was
writing about was, even from a purely entertainment level, negligible, then why bother?” (Rainer
2013)
The brief passage was extremely striking to me. If he found himself depressed at the
prospect of writing about more mediocrity, how could I hope to do the same?
“It's a little astounding to me there are so many people who want to be critics because the
job market has never been so dismal, and the movies haven't been all that hot either,” Rainer
said. “I guess it's gratifying in some ways, because it means people love movies and love writing
about movies.”
The statement in his book wasn’t the only thing that was striking. Rainer sees the bigger
picture in his reviews and writes topically with a sense of purpose. But he’s not political or a
“pundit” to the point that his worldview overwhelms what he’s trying to relay on screen. He’s
definitely a “critic” more so than a “reviewer,” but nothing he writes veers toward the academic,
and in fact he even somewhat discredited the idea of playing to that most passionate film-literate
crowd.
“One of the problems with criticism is an opposite thing,” Rainer said. “One is that
criticism is all opinion, no context and no depth. And the other is that, particularly in the more
esoteric film journals and sometimes in the daily papers as well, there's an in-grown sense of

87
movies relating to other movies and discussing films in terms of other films, talking about films
in such a rarefied sense. It's specialized in a way that I find to be somewhat irrelevant.”
Truth be told, hearing something like that makes it hard for me to put an easy label on
Rainer. Today he’s the critic for the Christian Science Monitor, but his name has been
everywhere. He’s a regular reviewer for FilmWeek on NPR, he wrote for the Los Angeles Herald
Examiner, the Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine. Rainer has taught criticism at USC,
and he edited the book of film reviews called Love and Hisses. This doesn’t even scratch the
surface of his resume.
I met with Rainer at a greasy spoon Santa Monica deli called Bagel Nosh. I perhaps
unwisely picked a table not far from a noisy intersection with a baby crying at a table in the
corner, and I had chocolate milk with my breakfast. Thankfully, I made a decent impression.
Rainer got the sense I wasn’t doing this just so I could meet Bruce Willis at the Hawaii Film
Festival (which, he adds, is a very nice film festival). That’s enough of a reason for me to keep
writing.

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Full Interview with Peter Rainer
In the introduction to your book, you write, "Where were the movies with the richness of,
say, great novels. It was important to me that the movies could be great in that way. If the
essence of what I was writing about was, even from a purely entertainment level, negligible,
then why bother?" Was there a point when you weren't as interested in the movies, and
what's the state of cinema now?
You have to differentiate between what movies can be and what they are. What's always
sustained me as a critic and a viewer is what movies can be. If you go to movies nowadays, there
isn't a tremendous amount of great stuff out there, and it's probably at a lower ebb than it has in
some time, at least if we're talking about Hollywood studio stuff. What I was saying in the
passage that you read, you have to find something to connect to in the movies that really
resonated for you and understand that that's what they can be, and that's what keeps you going. If
you go to franchise superhero summer pictures all the time or marginal indies, it's very easy to be
discouraged and think that the art form has ceased to exist and gone to the dogs. If that's true,
you just have to look a little harder some time.
When I wrote that particular passage, it was at a bad time for film, even worse then than
now I think. But I found in my biological cycle for film criticism that if I see six bad films and
then one good one, the seventh charges my batteries to get over the hump of the next six bad
ones. It's when you start seeing 40 in a row that are no good that you start to question.
But there are other compensations, because one of the things I love about being a critic is
you can write about movies at so many different levels. It's not necessarily the end game to be
writing about films purely on an aesthetic level or as an appreciator. Films reflect so much of
what's going on in society, politics and all these areas. You can discuss films on those levels, not
very good films often, and it can be very exciting. I'm not just talking about Zero Dark Thirty

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type of films. Any sort of film reflects the zeitgeist, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
I've talked to some critics who want to act as a pundit, and others who don't want to imbue
all the other stuff. Why do you feel writing about the topical aspect is very important?
Pundit can mean a variety of things. It can mean someone who has no regard for what the
film means or what it represents in a larger society. They just like to give pronouncements about
what's good and bad and why they're so great in thinking that. Then there are critics who expand
on that and try to talk about films in a larger societal sense, and that's much more my sense.
But you can't overdo it. You can't take any movie and immediately start inventing the
wheel and it's relation to everything going on in the world. This film Brooklyn that just came out,
I did have a parenthetical in there about how it's a silent rebuke to all the anti-immigration
comments you're hearing about Syria now. I don't think that was the intention of the filmmakers
necessarily, but it certainly does arise when you have that subject matter. I was talking with a
friend today who had a criticism of the film, which is somewhat valid, that the film is set in the
1950s, but it has this timeless quality, and what was really going on in the world in the 1950s is
not a part of that movie. A societal based critic would say that's true. You have to bring in the
aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War into that mix, but my answer to that would be that's
not really what the movie is about. There's a timelessness to it that's integral to the story itself.
How much do you want to know about a movie when you sit down to see it?
I try not to know too much. Partly that's because I like to be surprised. Critics are people
too, but because of what I do for a living, it's hard to tune all that out. I've been hearing about this
film in some cases for years, you know what the ups and downs of the production are, the
budget, and then there's all this Internet buzz chatter that I detest for the most part, and
particularly nowadays when everything is pitched for Oscar buzz. People make entire careers out

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of this, as if the Oscars were any particular bellwether for anything. But I understand the
commercial aspect of it and I understand why it's there.
If the movie is based on a novel, a play or historical event, then I do try to do as much of
that as I can, particularly if it's a great novel that I haven't read, I feel it behooves me to read it.
Not so much to do a compare and contrast book report, but if it gives me a better sense of the
movie, it's useful. Sometimes mention of an 800 page novel will get two sentences in a review;
sometimes it's more than that. But the film has to be approached on it's own terms, and that
means trying to clear away as much as possible all of the underbrush and kudzo that
accumulates.
What aspects of a film do you feel are most important to communicate in a review?
I think it's very important if you like a movie to express your excitement in a way that
inspires people to see perhaps more in it than they might have otherwise. You want readers to
discover a film. You don't want to hand them something that they can use as a consumer guide,
plain and simple.
A critic is first and foremost a writer. You can have all the "right opinions" and say all
the right things, but if the prose is leaden and the ideas are conventional, it's not going to be very
interesting criticism. There are critics who can be very contrary to what you believe, but their
insights and their writing is charged and exciting and challenging. It has a lot to do with wanting
to draw the reader in. And if you don't like a film, it behooves you to really explain why, not just
say, this film's a piece of shit.
What do you think is generally left out of most criticism?
On the web, and to some extent this has migrated into print, I think what's often missing
is the sense that criticism can be larger than it is. There's this notion that criticism is just

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opinionating, that if you put your opinion out there, that's criticism. "I liked this, I didn't like that,
this could've been better, etc." Opinions in and of themselves is not criticism.
Everybody's got one.
And in some respect people say everyone's a critic, everyone's got one, and why is yours
any better than mine? So you went to film school, you saw 5000 films, big deal. To some extent
I'm sympathetic to that. One of the problems with criticism is an opposite thing. One is that
criticism is all opinion, no context and no depth. And the other is that, particularly in the more
esoteric film journals and sometimes in the daily papers as well, there's an in-grown sense of
movies relating to other movies and discussing films in terms of other films, talking about films
in such a rarefied sense. It's specialized in a way that I find to be somewhat irrelevant.
What does a good review do?
All reviews are opinionated, and referencing other films I think is fine, as long as that
isn't the name of the game. If you're reviewing a De Palma movie and you mention Hitchcock or
Bunuel, that's fair game. But some critics like to bring in all this esoterica about stuff that really
is entirely irrelevant but is all about how many films one has seen. Seeing a lot of movies is by
no means a basic criteria to being a film critic. It helps that if you see a lot of movies you're less
likely to be gulled by stuff that's supposedly new but you know has been done to death a million
times, like people whose memories only go back five years.
But many of the more interesting things I've read about film have been written by people
who are not critics. People in sociology departments or art bring a different perspective to it. I
think the bottom line about criticism is that it has to be inspirational to the reader as a way to
discover the film more deeply than he or she might have on their own, both in a positive and a
negative sense. The value judgment per say is not terribly important. If you agree with a critic,

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that's neither here nor there. If someone comes to me and says, "I loved that review you wrote. I
agreed with everything you said," it's kind of like them saying, "Thank you for validating my
good taste." A better compliment would be, "I really disagreed with everything you said, I love
that film, but you really challenged me to hold my opinion."
Manny Farber is one of my favorite critics and I rarely agree with him on anything. He
knocked down just about every great film I ever liked. But his insights were so sharp and his
writing was so great that it was much more invigorating to read that than someone who says,
"Yeah, I agree with that."
I did a book once called Love and Hisses, which was a collection of essays by leading
critics on controversial movies of the previous 20 years. The point of that book is that criticism is
not the value judgment but how you get there. It's that word I hate to use, "journey," that gets you
there. Too many people don't realize that or don't understand that.
What are some mistakes that young writers make early on?
Some writers see criticism as being essentially an objective form. They think editors
sometimes encourage writers to never use the first person. That's very part of my "philosophy."
A critic is writing out of his whole life experience. Everything that he brings to a review comes
out of his own experience, personal, sexual, political, everything. It's silly to come on as some
Poobah from on high doling out these pronouncements in some sort of objective stance. There is
no such thing as an objective stance, not if it's good.
When you read reviews, someone will say, “Everyone around me was falling down in the
theater with laughter. I didn't think it was very funny, but judge for yourself.” That's sort of a
copout. From a reporting point of view it's okay, saying you were the only one who wasn't
laughing. However, you might say, "Maybe I was having a bad day." Maybe you were having a

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bad day, but that's who you are as a writer. A lot of critics tend to forget that and think of
themselves as objective.
In your book you said you used to work alongside the crime beat reporters and that you
had some things in common. In what ways?
You're trying to figure out whodunit. The difference is they're trying to figure out who
pulled the trigger, you're trying to figure out why what you're seeing on screen is the way it is. If
there was a murder committed and the felony was really awful, you're trying to dissect the body.
If you see something beautiful, you have to relay that the way a sports writer would talk about a
perfect game.
It's much more difficult to write a rave review well than a slam. It's easier to be nastier
than generous without falling into cliché. There are a lot of ways you can tear something down.
Some critics are known for tearing things up, but when it comes to really championing
something, the prose gets soggy. It's much more difficult to rise to the occasion. Whenever I see
a great movie I get a little nervous, particularly when it's a film that's very eccentrically great like
Blue Velvet, which was the cover of Love and Hisses. Now I have to really rise to the occasion. It
should be fun too, but flaying stuff gets old awful fast, especially if you've done it for a long
time. The real challenge is to rise to the occasion and try to do justice to what you're seeing on
screen. On the rare occasions when you think you've done that, it's a transcendent feeling and I
think it keeps me and a lot of critics going.
But I don't have any illusions that I change people's minds. Rare is the time, even with
myself, have I put down a review and said, "I'm absolutely wrong on this film; I loved it, but
after reading this, I hate it." There's something very essential about the film experience that cuts
under your radar, and you may agree intellectually with what someone says, but it hit you in the

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right way emotionally, and that's very hard to shake.
What do you think is your influence? Do you have an influence?
Not overwhelmingly no. I've written for a variety of publications over my career, and
some have had more potential for influence than others, be it New York Magazine or the LA
Times. But I also participate in this radio show and I think that has some influence. People hear
you on the radio, it's Friday, they want to know what movie they want to see, and if you
champion a small film, it often has a small influence on what people see.
You often don't know as a critic. Someone will send you a letter about how wonderful
you are and how much you've meant to them over the years, and that's very gratifying to read
that, and you can multiply that by the hundreds or thousands. But then you get the other letters
too. In the end, critics have never had a huge influence, maybe Ebert in his prime came the
closest, but critics have virtually no affect on box office when it comes to major studio releases.
It's not like if I pan Creed that Stallone is going to go, "I just lost $5 million on that review."
Reviews to some extent have become irrelevant if you're talking about studio stuff. People will
tend to see those films regardless.
But the converse is that critics do have real influence in small films, foreign language
films and documentaries. That's where you can make a difference. And the people who make
those films and the market are kowtowed to the critics as much as the studios don't because they
know they don't have the budget to promote these films. They live or die based on what the
critics say about them. If it opens at Toronto or Sundance and gets good reviews, then that is a
big deal. So what little influence I have is to make a case for films in those areas especially.
What do you think is the job of the critic?
I need to express myself on a film in such a way that inspires a reader to see more in the

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film than you might've seen otherwise. That's the aesthetic reason. The nuts and bolts reason is to
advise people of what to spend their money on or not.
You were the President of a very prestigious group of critics. But looking on the website,
many of them are listed as "freelance." What would you say then is the state of criticism?
If critics don't have an influence in the box office sense, what's the value of criticism for
this whole collective group?
When I started out in the mid-'70s, criticism was an entirely print-based occupation,
predominantly New York centric, and much more theoretical. You had the Kael vs. Sarris
debates, you had Dwight McDonald's high-brow, low-brow, middle-brow, and you had Manny
Farber's white elephant art vs. termite art. All this was the bread and butter of what criticism was.
A lot of people who wrote criticism wrote ostensibly on the other arts as well or were able to.
When Siskel and Ebert stepped into the arena with their show, it created a star system. I can be a
star like the stars I'm discussing. It gave it a celebrity quality that drew a lot of people in, and
you'd see a lot of people on television reviewing movies on the nightly news. So at a certain
point, people thought, not without justification, this is a cool thing to do. You get to watch
movies, you get paid, you get to hang out with the people who make these films and attend fancy
film festivals, and oh yes, you have to do a little writing. It brought a lot of people into the fold.
In my generation, many of us loved movies at an early age. The '70s were a great time for
movies, and many of us were writing for college or local newspapers. We got into print and had
this captive audience of fellow students and what not, and people thought this could be a serious
thing to do. And there were critical icons like Kael and Sarris to look up to.
Over time criticism has become more of a gig than a calling for a lot of people. Although
there are still many terrific critics, there are fewer places to be a terrific critic, which is

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distressing. People who want to get into the field, it would be useful to be independently wealthy
or to have another job. A lot of the websites where people break into now, they don't pay
anything and years later still don't pay anything. You're supposed to fall down in gratitude to be
put up on some of these websites, but it's the other people who are making the money, not you.
Everybody started out doing drudge work for nothing, but it didn't extend for years as the same
thing.
But criticism like it or not is an adjunct of the world of journalism, if you're talking about
being a professional critic. You can write stuff for the film magazines and journals and have your
own blog, and maybe it will even be good, and maybe you'll get paid five cents, but it's not a
career. To be a professional critic you have to be able to do everything I'm talking about here and
earn a living at it in a place that respects the work you do. Criticism is an adjunct of journalism,
meaning that when I first got into criticism, I had this rarefied idea that I would be a "film critic,"
end of story. But as part of the world of journalism, that is subsidizing your profession, meaning
you're part of magazines, newspapers, radio, or that machinery. The rise and fall of that
machinery determines, to a not insignificant extent, how you fare as a critic. There's a time when
New York had 12 daily newspapers. I worked for The Herald Examiner, the second biggest
newspaper in LA for 10 years, before I went to the LA Times, which is now the only daily
newspaper in the second largest city in America.
Journalism is now in a state of transition. We can't figure out where anything is going.
All of us who are in the criticism business, i.e. the journalism fellows, are caught in this
transitional vortex. In five years or 10 years, we'll have a much clearer sense of how this will
play out in terms of how to make money on the Internet. No one has figured that out yet, and
until they do, there are going to be more cutbacks, more issues, more ways in which people do

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more for less and less.
What can a young writer like myself do then to not just set themselves apart as a writer
and critic but someone who can be versatile to get into that machinery and to try and make
it a career as opposed to just a gig?
At any time in any era, there are people who are genuinely dedicated and who want to do
this more than about anything, and they will break through, as they always have. It's more
difficult to do now, at a very practical stand point, if you want to earn a living at it. The
advantage of something like Rotten Tomatoes or the web is that theoretically, it's a level playing
field. You can click on The New York Times or you can click on the Podunk Express, but before
you had to live in Podunk to read that critic. Now everything is all out there, so that's one good
aspect to it. But the aggregators aren't paying the people who they aggregate to post their
reviews, so in that sense you're getting ripped off, but on the other hand it is allowing everybody
to read what you write.
If I was starting out now, I'd do what I always did back in college. I was an idiot savant. I
knew very early on that I loved writing about movies and knew that was what I wanted to do. I
read Agee on Film, my dad gave it to me as a gift, and it completely opened my eyes as a critic.
So I felt the important thing to do is, you have to get into print. And you have to do it
consistently. All these old reviews I wrote when I was in college, they're cringe-worthy. But it
takes time to develop a style, a voice, all of that. You can only do that by writing consistently
and seeing films consistently too.
As a young critic, it's tough if you're not on a list. It's expensive. If you want to see even
five of the relevant films that come out each week, that's $100 a week. It's tough. There's
streaming, which I'm not crazy about, because I'm still old school enough that you should see

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films on a big screen whenever you can, but that's going by the wayside real fast. Even for me,
do I want to spend two hours in traffic to see this movie, or can I watch it online or with a DVD?
It's a no brainer.
But I think the important thing is get into print, and disseminate it in whatever way you
can. If you create a blog for yourself, that will at least give you the opportunity to have your say
unfettered by meddling editors or all sorts of other issues. Which is not to say that good writers
don't need good editors. That's one of the problems I have with the blogosphere in that it's all
unedited. But then you keep your eyes open for what may be out there.
It's a little astounding to me there are so many people who want to be critics because the
job market has never been so dismal, and the movies haven't been all that hot either. I guess it's
gratifying in some ways, because it means people love movies and love writing about movies.
But you have to understand what made you want to do this in the first place, and hold on
to it like crazy, because there will be a million and one reasons and discouragements to move
away from it. A lot of people are willing to make a name for themselves by sucking up to film
companies, advertisers, and there are some people whose entire career is built on supplying blurb
quotes for ads. Even some of the good ones on occasion. You know right away because there's
usually some reference to the Oscars. "It's only January, but this film will clean up at the
Oscars." Or Driving Miss Daisy: "drive this film straight to the Oscars!" I love being quoted. It
makes me feel good to see my name in print, but if I'm being quoted for a line that makes me
cringe or that was taken out of context, I feel cheap.
The important thing is that a critic is a writer. A critic is not some opinionater who is part
of the buzz. If that has real meaning for you and films have real meaning for you, and you make
a list of ten films that really changed you, carry that list around with you as an example of what

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films can be and what they can do to you, so you don't lose that feeling of why you came to this
in the first place. The same is true for writers. They don't have to be film writers necessarily.
Find something that you feel is inspiring to you as a writer and a lover of film and remember
them when you start to despair. Do what I do and say, “What about films by Satyajit Ray or The
Godfather?” There are always good films out there.
Alexander Astruc said film will never become a true art form until you can make a movie
with the same ease that a writer uses with pen and paper. To some extent that can happen now.
You can shoot it on your phone, you can edit it on your computer, you don't need lights, and
there are things you can do to cut the costs way down. So that may mean more people getting
into the movies, and maybe that means we'll get more great movies. Coppola once said all this
new-fangled stuff will be worth it if it means some 12-year-old girl in Omaha with braces will be
the next Eisenstein. Although he's not the critic who has to look through all those movies to find
that needle.
Criticism is in transition along with film itself. Most movies are not shot on film
anymore. With a few exceptions, everything is shot on digital and HD. I fear for the way films
look, and with everyone watching on a small screen or tablet, what will that do to the digital
image? I already see it. A lot of indie movies may be well written or well acted, but from a visual
standpoint, these films are nothing much to look at. Like Noah Baumbach or these guys, I don't
find anything terribly visually interesting about all of the new indie crop, and I have to think that
some of that is, why go to all the trouble of staging a scene of lighting and angles when there are
other things to worry about? As critics become more and more accustomed to watching films in
their home theaters and iPads and not going into theaters for all but the big movies, that could
have an affect film criticism too. Critics may feel they need to pay less attention to the visual

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aspects of film. It's just too distressing to keep noting its absence.
What are some things young writers can do to find their voice?
Some writers don't have a voice and never will, and there are some pretty good critics
who don't have much of a voice to speak of, but they have some good ideas and you trust their
opinion, so be it. I don't know that you can sit down and say, "Alright, this week I'm going to
develop a voice." You have to want it on some level. Most writers, certainly critics, usually come
out of a tradition. Critics from the '60s and '70s, there were critics who were highly influential in
terms of how one saw movies and how one wrote, predominantly Kael and Sarris. I felt that I had
to break away from that and find my own way of writing, seeing and speaking. I think that's
natural, and it's true of novelists too. Many of the novelists we think of as highly innovative were
influenced by other writers. You kill the one you love and then you move on.
To find your own voice you have to feel there is something inside of you that is unique
and worth expressing, and you have to write as well as you can without affectation or any sense
of really trying to please anybody but yourself. That may sound selfish, but it's what you have to
do. A writer has to be true to his or her own instincts and impulses, and you have to try to please
yourself as a writer. You have to make it interesting to yourself, otherwise it won't be interesting
to anybody else.
What gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
Writing really well on a film that's really challenging to write about. Writing prose that
sings, that expresses as close to how I feel as possible. If you hear back from people who are
moved by what you write, that's very gratifying too.
But you have to have a strong enough sense of yourself as a writer because there are
always going to be people who love and hate what you do. The profession itself is extremely

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contentious and full of people who will stab you not only in the back but in the front, people who
won't acknowledge what you do. It's highly competitive, and you have to have a sense in the end
of your own worth, and keep going. That develops your voice too. You have something that you
know you have to offer. Part of what works as finding a voice as a writer is the conversational
aspect of writing. Writing with a certain intimacy. A lot of good criticism is conversational in the
sense that the writer is writing directly for you. People say when they see Oprah, she can be
talking to a thousand people but it feels like she's talking just to you.
To some extent that's true of criticism as well. You are writing for this audience that
you've created for yourself that may or may not exist. You have some sense of who your
readership is, but you're writing for yourself. If you're true to your own instincts, your own
sensibilities, and even your own confusions. Critics don't necessarily have to come in knowing it
all. These reviews that wrap it all up and tie it all up in a bow, some films do that, but a lot of
films are profoundly confusing. I think it's okay to say that in a review sometimes.
A lot of people come out of a screening and say, "What do you think?" A lot of people
don't believe me when I say I'm not sure until I write the review. Because writing the review is in
itself a process of discovery. And when things are really humming as a critic, you discover
things, you bring things up out of yourself that you weren't aware of when you jotted down notes
in the dark. That aspect of finding out what you think when you're writing is another way of
discovering your voice and connecting. You see the way your mind is working, and it draws you
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Peter Rainer Takeaways – Write From Your Life Experience
Having Peter Rainer read my reviews was just a little intimidating. He read my thoughts
on Bridge of Spies and Trumbo very slowly, and he didn’t speak or offer his feedback until he
was done. I was trying to remain professional. In fact, I really just needed to relax.
In both pieces, Rainer sensed my writing was overly formal because I wanted to make an
official impression. To a degree, I was trying to “write through the movie,” as Keith Uhlich had
said, carefully picking my words and perhaps over doing it on plot detail in order to get at a
deeper criticism. What I left out was the informal quality that would’ve helped me better reach
how I truly feel.
Rainer’s analogy was that when Oprah is speaking to a room of people, she’s still
conversational and feels like she’s speaking directly to you. Rainer believes a critic is a writer,
and that “writing with a certain intimacy” can be helpful in finding your voice as a critic.
“A critic is writing out of his whole life experience. Everything that he brings to a review
comes out of his own experience, personal, sexual, political, everything. It's silly to come on as
some Poobah from on high doling out these pronouncements in some sort of objective stance.
There is no such thing as an objective stance, not if it's good,” Rainer said. “You can have all the
right opinions and say all the right things, but if the prose is leaden and the ideas are
conventional, it's not going to be very interesting criticism.”
My instinct in the review of Bridge of Spies was to compare it to Steven Spielberg’s
Lincoln, and Rainer felt had I followed up on that instinct more determinedly, I could’ve gone
further with an analysis of how Spielberg idealizes historical figures. Michael Phillips, Peter
Labuza and Uhlich all pointed out the value of making comparisons that help you get at what a
movie does or what it’s style is, but Rainer’s advice was encouraging to take the next step and
declare what that says about the film or the world at large.

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In the previous chapter, Labuza felt my second paragraph of my Suffragette review
would’ve been a stronger opening. With Trumbo, my first paragraph is quite similar, a question
lede that invokes the film’s politics and personality up front. But again, Rainer wanted to see
more of my own perspective in the piece, being unafraid to state my political leanings clearly
considering how controversial the Blacklist still remains.
The more significant point though is that writing from your own life experience livens the
prose and deepens the insights. Where Uhlich said there’s no such thing as consensus, Rainer felt
agreeing with a critic shouldn’t make a difference. People get hung up on whether a critic
reflects their point of view and will even stop reading the ones who don’t. But for Rainer and
others, the most interesting writers and critics are the ones who challenge your instincts with
good ideas and sharp writing. Having your own opinion validated is overrated.
“To find your own voice you have to feel there is something inside of you that is unique
and worth expressing, and you have to write as well as you can without affectation or any sense
of really trying to please anybody but yourself,” Rainer said. “A writer has to be true to his or her
own instincts and impulses, and you have to try to please yourself as a writer. You have to make
it interesting to yourself, otherwise it won't be interesting to anybody else.”

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Bridge of Spies – As Edited by Peter Rainer
In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the President worked nobly to free the slaves through the
passage of the 13
th
Amendment, but in the context of the film his work was a thankless task,
controversial and even reviled. What’s more, the film’s signature set piece, the Congressional
vote, was a simple re-enactment of political theater but played for the biggest suspense on the
grandest stage.
Spielberg’s follow up Bridge of Spies is a Cold War drama that follows a character with a
similar plight. James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a pariah, a man without a country despite
working on behalf of it, and his job is equally simple and thankless: defend the rights of a Soviet
Spy and negotiate his exchange. As he did with Lincoln, Spielberg is taking the small-scale
conflicts and telling them writ large, with all the style and Hollywood storytelling of any of his
more ambitious action or sci-fi films. Bridge of Spies may be the story of a humble, average
American insurance lawyer, but it isn’t modest, and the film’s simplicity is exactly the point.
1

Donovan is tasked with defending Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in court after he’s
captured and outed as a spy for the Soviet Union. Hanks plays Donovan with the same spark as
James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder, a man with principles and values but not without an
attitude and the ability to tell off a CIA agent who demands to know what Abel has been telling
him. Twice Donovan invokes people as cowardly for shirking their responsibility to the
American justice system. He’s a boy scout, but he’s often on the offensive.

1
I think when you talk about Spielberg's relationship between Lincoln and Donovan, I would see
that as a jumping off point and get more into the ways in which Spielberg tends to idealize
historical figures for instance. You've got this Lincolnesque Donovan who bucks everybody, but
that aspect of it as a critic is something you can expand upon. It's a good insight, and your
instinct was to lead with that. So if you're doing that, I would be less concerned about the various
plot elements and building on that in an auteurist view of Spielberg and how he connects with
these idealized characters, and is he really doing justice to these characters?

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Abel on the other hand is without emotion, displaying no fear or worry in his
conversations with Donovan, and the two have an awkward chemistry that Spielberg feeds off of.
Everything in Bridge of Spies is simple and straight-forward in its discussion of politics, and
Spielberg hones in on the awkward silence that drives their understanding of one another.
Abel is inevitably convicted, but Donovan successfully helps him avoid the death penalty
by hinting at the possibility of a trade of spies between the Russians and the Americans. After a
spy pilot goes down in Russian territory, Donovan is whisked away to the far side of the Berlin
Wall, which we see actually being constructed, in order to negotiate the exchange.
1

For all its Cold War theatrics, including one thrilling action sequence involving the crash
landing of the American spy pilot, Bridge of Spies is for the most part a courtroom drama, the
stuff of conversation, negotiation and debate. Spielberg, working from a screenplay by the Coen
Brothers and Matt Charman, never complicates the core tension of whether this one man will win
his freedom with more elaborate chases or thriller set pieces. Spielberg finds the most drama in
how Donovan can talk his way out of tight spots, like when his German counterpart parks him in
front of border patrol agents as a negotiating tactic. And when Bridge of Spies reaches its climax
of the actual exchange, the simple act of just walking across the bridge has all the suspense of the
voting sequence in Lincoln.
Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is calm and more classical in its lengthier shot
lengths and composition. But it has a lush look full of deep blues and gets more ragged and
handheld as Donovan navigates his way through East Berlin. Thankfully his work here is more

1
If you have unlimited space, often times what you'll find professionally is you'll have to figure
out, how am I going to utilize this space? Because a lot of plot description, that's not particularly
critical, it's just setting it up. Usually when you put that amount of stuff into a review, the real
value lies in setting up your opinion or your thoughts of what that means.

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understated than the Gone with the Wind artificiality of War Horse (still a gorgeous film in its
own right), but Bridge of Spies still has that Old Hollywood quality that can make it timeless.
At the film’s close, Donovan looks out the train window into Brooklyn and sees a specter
of the demons he witnessed in East Berlin, of children clambering over a fence in desperation. At
that moment we learn his hardships are just beginning. The real Donovan went on to negotiate
the exchange of countless more spies that could arguably cement his contribution as an American
hero, but with Bridge of Spies Spielberg has the audacity to tell the story of just one.

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Trumbo – As Edited by Peter Rainer
Did the injustice of the Hollywood Blacklist have to do with Americans’ Cold War fears,
how we suppressed the First Amendment rights of thousands, or how we wrongly persecuted and
led a witch hunt against innocents and those just expressing political beliefs?
1
Or was it all
because Dalton Trumbo was just too good?
Trumbo, the biopic on the life of the Oscar winning, yet blacklisted screenwriter, is filled
with some stirring sentiments and American values. As Trumbo, Bryan Cranston delivers
winning speeches with impeccable diction, all while maintaining his position as a contentious,
even disagreeable figure. Jay Roach’s film though may just be a little too fun for its lofty
ambitions. The screenplay touts values of Free Speech, but the story itself suggests the motto,
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
Trumbo was brought up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, so the film is fascinated with
that Old Hollywood charm, playing off campy fun biopic beats as it checks off the list of stars
who made their way through Trumbo’s life: Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas,
Otto Preminger. The cast all gets their moments to do their mini-impressions of some of
Hollywood’s most iconic and eccentric figures. Trumbo even opens with a montage of some of
Trumbo’s many credits and takes us through his work on Roman Holiday, Spartacus, The Brave
One, and Exodus, and Roach peppers the score with slinky jazz and a light, breezy tone. Much
early on is even told through news reels rather than personal moments.
And yet Trumbo can be questionably chipper when dealing with the severity of The
Blacklist and The Hollywood 10. Trumbo was one of the first waves of Communists brought in
front of HUAC, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify and name names

1
I wouldn't be afraid in talking about the historical aspects of it that even when you're talking
about historical stuff, it's okay to inject your own take on it. The Blacklist is such a controversial
area. You might as well lay your cards out on the table and say what you think about it.

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about his involvement with the Communist Party. Many Hollywood insiders, including his
liberal friend Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), sold him and his colleagues out. In turn,
Trumbo and the other nine spent up to a year in prison despite not committing a crime, and they
were barred from ever working in Hollywood again.
Trumbo instead took up aliases and fixed up bad B-movie scripts for producer Frank
King (John Goodman), and Roach has a lot of fun with this concept. The behind-the-scenes
dealings and a money-grubbing John Goodman brandishing a baseball bat at those threatening to
boycott him are hugely entertaining, and often more of interest to Roach than the pain and
suffering brought on by the Blacklist.
Roach illustrates the hatred of Communists through plainspoken bigots throwing drinks
at Trumbo at a movie theater or the big talk threats of Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda
Hopper (Helen Mirren). But it overlooks the Trumbo family retreat to Mexico, or the deaths that
even took place during the period. Instead he zones in on the family drama and how Trumbo’s
shadow screenplay work took a toll on his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) and his equally political and
outspoken daughter Nikola (Elle Fanning in Nikola’s teenage years).
Cranston though is largely the catalyst behind Trumbo’s added weight, political
significance and modern relevance. His Hollywood 10 colleague Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) asks,
“Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiseled onto a rock?” Cranston’s hitched up
pants, his hunched posture as he marches about the room, and the way he chomps on a cigarette
or cigar certainly smack of a “performance”, but he’s modest enough in his speech to make it
convincing. Where everyone else is clear-cut about their politics, Cranston plays Trumbo as
largely articulate and argumentative of principles over strict ideas. In one scene he stands up to
John Wayne and challenges Duke’s non-existent war record, despite how he invokes the war to

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condemn people like Trumbo. The wit and words behind Cranston’s performance help elevate
Trumbo as an artist and thinker but also show how he might be difficult at parties.
1

Roach’s film may be too entrenched in Hollywood history and royalty to not somewhat
diminish the Cold War era hardships of the Blacklist, but Trumbo’s name was suppressed for
years, and now this film proudly adorns it as a fitting title and story.
2

1
You talk more about the performances because they're central to the movie and bring in the
historical aspects in a way that's not simply putting it out there but dealing with the drama of the
story at the time.
2
Give more of who you are conversationally, because now you're a bit more officious the way
you write, because you want to make an official impression. But the way you make an
impression is to be more informal than formal, and it doesn't mean you're any less serious. On
the contrary. It means that you're opening up more to how you feel, and if you find yourself
going into byways and something controversial, don't worry about it. Don't be afraid to make
mistakes.

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Chapter 5: Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic at The New York Times since 2004. I
respect her writing immensely. And yet I asked Manohla Dargis the wrong question: How does
being a woman seep into your writing? Is that something you consciously think about?
“Dude, how could you ask that,” she said. “How do you think of yourself as a man? You
live in your body. You are who you are, right? Your experience is completely embodied by being
a man. You're white. Your experience, your identity, is an embodied identity. Every day that you
wake up in the morning, you're not thinking about, "I'm a man! Living in a white man's body!"
But that's your identity, that's your experience, and that's how it's filtered. That's the same for
me.”
It’s painfully obvious to me now that any good writer, a man or a woman, doesn’t wake
up in the morning and decide to write like someone they’re not. But what I wanted to get at with
this ill-thought out question was in essence what it is to be a female critic, simply for the fact that
my experience is filtered.
“I am not interested in being a ‘female critic.’ I am one just by birth. I am interested in
being a critic,” Dargis said.
Dargis started her career in 1987 writing about avant garde films for The Village Voice,
although she confessed it was an area of film she knew very little about, and at that point she
hardly considered it a career. Under the tutelage of critic J. Hoberman, Dargis made a foothold at
the Voice and continued her work in the alternative press at LA Weekly in 1994, becoming film
editor the following year. This was the alternative press, and turning to first the Los Angeles
Times and then The New York Times was to her like selling out, becoming part of the
“establishment.”

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“It was very shocking to me to have finally landed at The New York Times. I was the
establishment, the man, but I come from this alternative background,” Dargis said. “I didn't
change. My personality didn't change. My taste didn't change. My language had to change
because I couldn't write ‘mother fucker’ anymore in the paper. That didn't bother me. I could
find other ways to be entertaining.”
Dargis is one of the best because she feels like the alternative writer with edge and wit,
yet writing with beautiful prose and a heap of authority. Her conversation pieces she does for the
Times with A.O. Scott have a definitive quality, and she knows her words and her opinions in
print carry an awful lot of weight that she wouldn’t have elsewhere.
Meeting with her at a trendy Silver Lake coffee shop where she often conducts interviews
of her own, I somehow didn’t expect her to be so sharp, funny and unfiltered. This was the Critic
with a Capital C from The New York Times, after all. But any rarefied image of some elite,
“establishment” critic I might’ve had quickly disappeared as I came to know her and her
alternative background. I promised I wouldn’t ask her any more of the wrong questions.

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Full Interview with Manohla Dargis
What's your process when you sit down to write a review?
"Writing is thinking." For me, that is very much the case. I sit down, and then I just start
writing, and whatever is swirling in my head starts to take form as I write. I am really thinking as
I'm writing.
Movies are interesting because they can be emotionally overwhelming, and as a critic,
you have to work through your emotional interaction with what you thought of the object. How
does it work like a movie, and why did it work? How is the director making this movie work for
you emotionally? Is it cheap? Is it deep? And then you start working on the movie's form and
how it functions as a film. There's a lot going on.
That's one of the reasons I'm not on Twitter. Some people are very good right out of the
gate, but I need a little time to think about something. I can have an immediate opinion, but that
immediate opinion may not be the most interesting thing. Now that I'm at The New York
Times and have been for the past 11 years, me saying something off the cuff sometimes, not
because of me but because of the paper, will actually have more weight than it would if I were
somewhere else. I'm very careful when I walk out of a movie not to necessarily say what I think
because I don't want it set in stone. I've had people walk up to me at festivals and say, "Oh I
heard you didn't like it," or "I heard you loved it.” But that's been kind of distorted, and it's kind
of a drag because it's not just me saying I didn't like something but The New York Times.
Because I now carry this institutional weight with me, I'm careful right out of the gate.
What other pressures do you feel writing under that banner at The New York Times that
you wouldn't feel elsewhere?
It's its own thing, but now I'm used to it. You're in their house, and you play by their
rules. But I respect the rules, and they're generally speaking about language. There are certain

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things you can't say. They don't want you to be overtly political. This is all in their standards.
They're my boss and I understand that.
The only time I feel it as a weight is giving negative reviews to very small movies. Some
people like giving negative reviews; I don't. Even if it's funny, it's not because I'm sitting there
rubbing my hands together and cackling. I write for the reader, I write for the movie. I want to do
justice to the movie and I want to engage the reader. Those are the two things that are paramount
in my mind. I want to be able to explain to the reader in as precise and engaging way as I can
what worked about the movie, what didn't work about the movie and why it matters or doesn't
matter. I want people to read me, but it's because I want to have this engagement about cinema. I
think that it matters and I think there's not enough interesting writing about movies. Everyone
thinks they're a movie critic. Some of them aren't.
What context do you feel is important when discussing film?
Each movie review is different. I have a friend who says he writes to a template, so every
review is the same, and I literally don't understand that. The only way the job can remain
interesting for me and to write about movies that are bad so that I don't feel despair, there's
always something to write about a movie. It took me a really long time to understand that.
There's always something you can write about it, even a terrible, boring movie. There's always a
thread. And that just means you have to work harder. And it just means you have to not give in
to, you'll see with middle-aged critics, a fatigue or cynicism, and that's a life choice in a way.
That sounds really dorky, but I choose not to give into cynicism. I choose not to do that. The
movies may be good one year, bad one year, better one year, worse one year, but I need to make
it interesting for me and the reader.
What aspects of a film do you feel are most important to communicate about a film?

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Sometimes I've written about a movie, and I haven't written a single thing about the
acting. Sometimes I just forget, because it just wasn't interesting to me. I always feel you should
go with what is most interesting to you. That's the thing that you're going to get excited about
and will make it lively for yourself, and you need to feel excited, interested and turned on
intellectually. You hope that excitement you have, good or bad, will manifest itself in a review.
I try not to write a lot about the plot. Anyone now can go onto IMDb and read a plot
synopsis, so it's incumbent on arts writers to be more interesting than that. That's so boring.
How much do you want to know about a movie when you sit down to see it?
The ideal is to not know a single thing. I love going to Cannes where, aside from the fact
that you're in the South of France at Cannes and you're seeing all the best work that can possibly
be at that moment, it hasn't been through the machine yet. I'll know it's a new Nanni Morretti
movie, but I don't know anything about it! I don't know who's in it, I don't know if it's good or
bad. There's no buzz, which is always manufactured, most of the time. There's nothing going in,
and how exciting! You're getting the brand new object. You, along with several thousand other
people in the room, you're opening the box and getting to see it. There's no one else. You're
seeing the new Lars von Trier film all at the same time. Maybe some sales agent saw it, the
movie people who made it saw it, but in terms of press? That's fucking awesome. I never read
any other critic before I write or see a movie. I don't want to know what anyone else thinks, and I
just want to have my little opinion.
What are some things that often get left out of criticism?
I'll tell you what gets left out: talking about the movie itself and how it works. I think
people do a lot of plot synopsis. People still tend to write about movies as if they were books.

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They're not talking about what makes it cinematic and how is that movie making meaning? I am
extremely influenced in that regard by David Bordwell, who I am a great admirer of.
How did you develop a love of movies?
I didn't develop a love of movies; it was just instilled in me at an early age. My parents
used to take me to movies when they were young and Bohemian and couldn't afford babysitters
and would just haul me off to the movies, so I had very rarefied tastes as a child. This is
absolutely true: my favorite two movies as a kid were Jean Cocteau's Orpheus and Jules & Jim.
Those are the movies that I saw as a child, and I think that early introduction to art film was very
important in terms of my development.
My parents shielded me though from Disney. There are decades of Disney that I don't
know anything about because I never saw it. The Nutty Professor and The Love Bug. I didn't
know about those. I was really watching art films when I was a kid. And I was watching
everything. I was in a movie mad household, I went to movies weekly, and there were no
prohibitions. And I could see anything I wanted, like really adult stuff like Five Easy Pieces. But
I could also see things like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies or Shirley Temple movies
because we had a repertory theater near me, so I got a very broad education. So very early on I
had no sense of high and low. There was no, "this is a more privileged type of movie than this."
They were all movies.
How did you start out writing reviews and start your career?
But I didn't have a career. Back then, I didn't think about a career. I was at graduate
school at NYU in the cinema studies program there. I took a class with Jim Hoberman. I knew
who he was, but I really wanted to take a writing class because I had a hard time finishing my
papers. So I just thought I needed the discipline of writing. He liked me, then recommended me

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to the Voice, but I didn't start writing reviews right away. My first job was writing about avant
garde cinema, which I knew very little about. And after that they asked me if I wanted to review
other movies. I knew it was a good opportunity that came my way, but it was an accident.
How can writers get their start today?
The landscape obviously is very different, but there are a lot of places to write. I was just
talking to Tony about this actually. We were talking about a certain entitlement we've seen with
younger writers that we're both really surprised at. He has some friend who is 30 and she's angry
that she hasn't been hired by The New York Times yet. And he and I are like, "We're so lucky that
we have these great jobs." But I don't see it as a matter of entitlement. I think the main thing is to
work really hard. You have to work really hard. I haven't worked a 35-hour week in a very long
time, maybe ever since I started freelancing.
If you realize that you are not a genius, and I am not a genius, then you have to work
harder than everybody else. You just have to work much harder. I recognized I was not a genius
when I was 12 years old. I went to an accelerated school with very, very smart people. I was
going to school with geniuses, and when you realize you are not a genius, it's kind of crushing.
But then you just have to work harder than everybody else.
Is this sense of entitlement something you see a lot on the web or elsewhere?
It depends on the person. I don't think it's generational, and I'm not condemning your
generation. But I've always seen people who are just surprised at where they're at, and I just say,
"Well, your writing's not very good. I don't know what to say." Right now it's tricky because
obviously old school mainstream journalism is in flux, but we have a couple of people who are
freelancers for us who are not able to make a living from us, but they have day jobs and then

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they freelance doing reviews. But there are a lot of online places where people need reviews, and
you just have to plug away.
What is the Times doing to push forward criticism and make it meaningful to people?
I don't think criticism is in the service of the industry. People will say reviews don't have
anything to do with the box office. Well why should it? We're not there to serve the industry.
What is the point of arts criticism? Is it to further the industry? Obviously there's a symbiotic
relationship, but I see criticism as expanding upon a conversation about art. I think you need
criticism with art. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum.
What do you think is the job of the critic?
To write well. I'm basically serving three masters: myself, the reader and the movie. And
you're just balancing that constantly.
Do a lot of people fulfill that job?
No they do not. Do you think that?
It depends. There are a lot of critics I admire, but then as a young critic I get frustrated
when I see someone at a legitimate publication and think, "They're terrible."
I think what the Times is doing inside the Culture department, is that they realize that
critics are very important still. A lot of the received wisdom is that critics don't matter. I would
argue that in fact critics matter more than ever if just to help guide you to good stuff. When I first
started at the Times, maybe there were 500 movies opening in New York in a year. Now there
are almost a thousand. You've heard of the paradox of choice, right?
You wrote about that at one point, and it created this strange controversy. You want to
promote certain films, but many of them are just being "four-walled" and aren't worth the
time. So is it difficult to say you don't want to have to review all these films?

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It's not hard to say anymore. It's complicated, because the Times used to have a mandate
to review everything that opened in New York. That was something we used to be able to do. We
kept it going. But then it became a question of finite resources, which is actually hilarious to me.
People would ask why we can't just run it online. As if somehow we wouldn't pay our writers if
you were published online. There's a finite amount of money to go around.
We're not at the point of books or music, but we're not where we were. And we have to
make choices. I've just seen too much stuff that does not merit being on screens. It was stuff that
back in the old days of VHS you would be stepping on because they would be at the bottom of
the rental shelf. They're just crap, right to video. And it's because there's this very big maw, and
it's called the Internet, and there are all these streaming services, and they just want content.
They don't give a shit whether it's good or bad; they just want stuff. They need to feed that
beast.
What do you feel is your influence as a critic?
I try not to think about it. I do know. You work at the Times and you're very aware.
Critics can't make or break... One of the worst things about Pauline Kael is that she obviously
liked making or breaking movies or people. I think that's not the job of the critic. I'm not there to
make or break a movie. I don't think that critics have ever played a role in bringing people into
big movies people are going to go to anyway. I don't think that critics have gone with the wind.
Just like critics don’t make Transformers.
Where critics do make a difference are generally more of the artsy crowd, foreign
language films, films that are going to play at art cinemas. But when I sit down and write, I'm not
there to help the movie. I am not a nurse. I'm not there to assist the industry. Not at all.

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What's been your experience with your audience? The Times obviously has a massive
influence.
It's very weird to know that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people are
reading your stuff. If you think about it too much, you might get paralyzed.
Are there enough women writing about the arts?
No, that's empirical. There are people doing studies about that, and you can read that.
Martha Lauzen, she's at San Diego State University. She's done a couple of studies looking at
critics in terms of gender. I don't know if enough people have looked at race, but it's
overwhelmingly white male.
When I used to belong to the LA Film Critics, it was just weird to be in that room. All
these dudes, it was just a weird thing. Historically, newspapers were male dominated and so why
are we surprised that criticism at newspapers would be overwhelmingly male dominated? In the
movie industry, it's much more of a topic these days than ever before. We're talking about two
institutions with a long history of a lack of diversity, so why are we surprised that criticism is
profoundly white, and profoundly male in the 20th Century? It's changing, but change comes
slowly.
How does being a woman seep into your writing? Is that something you consciously think
about?
Dude, how could you ask that? How do you think of yourself as a man? You live in your
body. You are who you are, right? Your experience is completely embodied by being a man.
You're white. Your experience, your identity, is an embodied identity. Every day that you wake
up in the morning, you're not thinking about, "I'm a man! Living in a white man's body!" But
that's your identity, that's your experience, and that's how it's filtered. That's the same for me.

120
I am not interested in being a "female critic." I am one just by birth. I am interested in
being a critic.
What is it like to be a woman writing on the web, even writing at a place like The New York
Times?
When I was at the Voice, I got a lot of hate mail, when people actually had to sit down
and write me a letter and go to the post office. It's amazing, the effort, right? It's a movie! What
the fuck? Jim Hoberman said women always got more hate mail. Always. It was just about being
a mouthy woman. Women with opinions make some men very uncomfortable. Women with very
strong opinions, about let’s say traditional male territory, will make certain men in particular
very uncomfortable.
The only thing you have to do, if you're going to be a woman with a strong opinion and
put it out there, my feeling is, suck it up and fight back. I feel very strongly about this. Don't just
sit in your corner and cry. It didn't get women the vote to sit in the corner and cry. What got
women the vote was that there were women who went to jail and they fought. And if you want to
be treated equally, you need to be able to suck it up and fight back. Sometimes I was really
attacked because I was a woman, and you had to wonder about some of these opinions, well
"Fuck you right back!" I'm just going to really push back. And my biggest revenge is just being
better and writing better. Screw you, I'm just going to be really good.
One of the things that's interesting for me is, I come out of the alternative press. I wrote at
The Village Voice and at LA Weekly, so it was very shocking to me to have finally landed at The
New York Times. I was the establishment, the man, but I come from this alternative background.
I didn't change. My personality didn't change. My taste didn't change. My language had to

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change because I couldn't write "mother fucker" anymore in the paper. That didn't bother me. I
could find other ways to be entertaining.
What is it like working with A.O. Scott, or to have a critic like that in your corner and be
able to write side by side? You do a lot of conversation pieces that seem to be very
comprehensive and definitive.
We just became closer and closer friends, and when the job opened up, he asked if I was
interested. At first it wasn't a chief critic's job. It was to be a Number 2, and I was like "I'm the
chief critic at the LA Times. Fuck no!" But then they re-negotiated, and I would only come to The
New York Times if I could be the chief critic. I was older than him, I had written longer than him,
and they wanted me to be a deputy, and I was like, "What the fuck?" And I knew it would be
very uncomfortable because it would be like he was my boss.
But over the years, he's been one of my closest friends. We're very close. We write
together really well. We've written things back and forth, we've written things in blocks of text,
and we've written pieces together. We have an on-going conversation about movies, and we put
that conversation into the paper. It's great to have that and we're very lucky.
The most recent one you did was, "Yay Hollywood!" What then would you say is the state
of cinema in that regard?
The state of cinema is always in crisis. It's always recovering from crisis. It's the eternally
rising phoenix, coming out of the ashes. If you look at it historically, the American movie
industry is generating itself from these crises. It's a historical thing where the coming of sound is
a new crisis, then the coming of television, all these successive waves. But the mainstream movie
industry is very good at siphoning off other energies. It's vampire-like. The most recent example
of the independent movement of the '90s and 2000s, all the talent that comes out of independent

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cinema, that's been fed into the mainstream. It's like a vampire. I'm mixing my metaphors with
phoenix and vampire. But think of someone like Christopher Nolan, who goes from making
Following for nobody to the biggest franchise. Bryan Singer's first feature was at Sundance. The
movie industry has always had that cycle.
We're in a really interesting cycle now that no one knows anything about. Here's an easy
way to think about it: Once upon a time, money was generated through one primary source in the
movie industry, and that was from theatrical exhibition. Set up the movie, it plays two weeks,
maybe two months. But then home video comes up in the '80s, and now you have endless
pipelines. For a company, it's all about content. That's the reason why there's so many more
movies and so much more television. Now, with Netflix, Amazon, Google, it goes on and on and
on. So it's a really good time to be in "content." It's not my term, but it's what they use.
What's a mistake a lot of young writers make in their reviews?
Using the word "I" for starters. I don't want to hear about it. I don't know who the fuck
you are, so I don't care what you think of it. That's not interesting to me. I think you have to earn
the "I." That's something I feel pretty strongly about. Someone wrote an interview with Todd
Haynes and the writer talked about how "I came out of the theater," and I don't want to hear
about your experience. I want to hear about Todd Haynes and his new movie.
You can personalize something without making "I, I, I." You have to use it carefully, and
earn the "I." I don't use it very often, but I do as a kind of strategy. It's a reflex, it's always
coming out of blog writing, which can be very diaristic.
I also think that a lot of people who start writing online have very little sense of structure
because you can write forever. You can write 2000, 3000 words, and I'm telling you, after I've
scrolled down three pages, I don't want to keep reading. I think one of the things about writing

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short is it gives you discipline for writing with structure. You have to beware that your writing
does not start mimicking the medium in which you're being published, that your writing does not
take the shape of the Internet, which is this endless spew.
What should young critics keep in mind when writing?
Just because this may be the first time you've ever encountered something doesn't mean
this is the first time it's ever been encountered. Yay for you, but this is not interesting. Just
because it's new to you does not mean it's new to the world, and you need to find the balance
with that. Don't just bluff your way through as if you know every single thing, but to write as if
you've discovered something?
How can a young critic find their voice?
Just by writing. Some people find their voice really quickly. But some people will be
writing for a couple of years, and that voice won't emerge for a couple of years because they
have to find that space where they're comfortable. How much of them are they putting through?
Pauline Kael wrote like a fucking boxer, but she was this little shrimp of a lady.
How would you define your voice?
I think it's weird to try and understand what you're voice is. The only thing I can do is to
be very honest. The thing I learned from my friend Amy Taubin was to not be embarrassed about
what you like. Sometimes I think it's harder for them in a way because there's a kind of "cool
boy" thing in that you have to like certain records. But I'm in touch with my bad taste, and I'm
okay with that. I'm going to like movies that are really kitschy and stupid, and I don't care.
As a critic, you have to really trust what you like and not worry what anyone else likes.
One of the worst things mainstream critics do is they're not reviewing the movie but reviewing
the movie through the filter of other opinions. So if a movie has been really well received at

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Cannes, by the time it opens through New York, they're not reviewing the movie, they're
reviewing the reaction and trying to take that movie down. They're reactive critics. But they're
not reviewing the "thing." They're reviewing the movie through this filter, and I think it's
disastrous. I think it makes a liar out of your writing.
If you like a Transformers movie, then fucking like it. Be okay about liking things that
you know other people won't like and not care. The only thing I am is me. I don't care what
anyone else thinks about a movie. I do not give a shit. I really don't. It's not interesting to me.
And that's the only way I can be very honest in print, is to not care what anyone else thinks.
Because I have to be absolutely honest about my own reaction, feelings, and intellectual
grappling with the movie. I cannot care what anyone else thinks. I just cannot. What you start
doing is you're not reviewing the object. You're dealing with all this other noise.
What gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
It's fun. It's a nice way to make a living. What else can I say? I do something that I really
enjoy doing. And I think that as an adult I'm in a very privileged position. I feel very, very
fortunate.
How do you get to where you are at the Times?
It's very hard to get a job at The New York Times. Tony was very unusual getting his job
at the Times because they were rebooting the culture section, and he was untested. But I was a
chief critic at the LA Times, and they just hired a TV critic, and he was the critic at Time
Magazine for 14 years. It's very much an establishment place. They do sometimes bring new
people in, but it's difficult. The Times looks at other places. My friend Wesley Morris was just
hired, but he won a Pulitzer! It's the establishment newspaper next to The Wall Street Journal.
It's not necessarily a place where people will come up through the ranks.

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If that is the lofty goal in mind, what should people do?
You just have to work on your writing. You have to be the best writer you can possibly
be. I just have never really been good about strategizing a career, but obviously I have a career,
but I've always thought, "Oh, how did that happen?" I was working at the Voice for ten years,
then the Weekly for ten years, and it came a point where I could not stay in the alternative press
anymore.
Is film criticism a career?
It's always been a very rarefied one. It's always been a very unusual way to make a living.
Being a critic is a rare bird.
There's a lot of anguish about a lot of publications that have folded, but it's moving very
fast, and we're in the middle of a historical moment and we can't tell what is going to happen. It
was always tough. It was tough when I started in 1987. Back then there was no Internet, but now
you have to get noticed because there are so many places.
There are some people who are very interested in branding. I don't believe that humans
are brands. Ebert was Ebert before he was a brand. Ebert was very good at what Ebert did, and
he and Siskel had this unusual, anomalous thing that no one was able to replicate, and they
bottled it for a while, but also then the world changed. Part of the thing with Tony and Michael
[Phillips] was that by the time that show was reinvented, the world had changed so much. I'm
just really a big believer in talent, and I honestly believe talent wins out.
Do you enjoy writing?
I do love it. I'm unusual in that way. I don't love it when I'm not writing well. But when
it's going well and you know you've risen to the occasion, it's fun. Like I said, writing is thinking.
I hope the fun comes through, because I'm having fun. What can be nicer than being able to write

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about a Frederick Wiseman movie? What an amazing privilege that is. I get to live in a time
when this great filmmaker is making great work. It's amazing.

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Manohla Dargis Takeaways – Be In Touch With Your Bad Taste
It’s easy to get the sense from this conversation that Manohla Dargis doesn’t care what
anyone else thinks. Dargis is “in touch” with her bad taste. She reviles the idea that critics often
review the reaction rather than the object. You don’t need to use the first person in reviews. And
she resists reading other reviews before writing her own and doesn’t broadcast her thoughts on
Twitter immediately upon walking out of a theater.
“I have to be absolutely honest about my own reaction, feelings, and intellectual
grappling with the movie,” Dargis said. “I cannot care what anyone else thinks.”
But Dargis does care very deeply for the reader. She said her writing must serve three
masters: herself, the movie and the reader. And even though she comes from an alt press
background, where trading in film jargon may be more widely accepted, and even though she
wields power to write for a more intellectual readership at The New York Times, Dargis is very
conscious of clearly articulating complex ideas of how a movie generates meaning for a general
audience.
Dargis edited my review of The Revenant, and she recommended cutting many of the
references to other films, slimming down on plot description, avoiding thorny film language like
“mise-en-scene,” but teasing out more of how the director is trying to give his film meaning.
Keith Uhlich said reviewing has a selfless and selfish component. Even with a film you didn’t
enjoy, and for me The Revenant is certainly that, by diving into the choices the director is
making, you’re working out for yourself why the film made you feel the way it did. But you’re
also serving your audience by approaching the material honestly, fairly and with some
enthusiasm.
“You'll see with middle aged critics a fatigue or cynicism, and that's a life choice in a
way. That sounds really dorky, but I choose not to give into cynicism,” Dargis said. “That's the

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thing that you're going to get excited about and will make it lively for yourself, and you need to
feel excited, interested and turned on intellectually. You hope that excitement you have, good or
bad, will manifest itself in a review.”
Peter Rainer similarly said that there’s always a thread you can find to make your review
worth reading, because if there isn’t anything interesting to you, there won’t be anything
interesting for the reader. But Dargis also closely aligns with Peter Labuza, who felt that,
because of the Internet, writers write at length without prioritizing their thoughts. Dargis says it
results in young critics on blogs writing endlessly, far too much like a personal diary or journal,
and leaning on the word “I” as a crutch.
“You can personalize something without making ‘I, I, I,’” Dargis said. “I think one of the
things about writing short is it gives you discipline for writing with structure. You have to
beware that your writing does not start mimicking the medium in which you're being published,
that your writing does not take the shape of the Internet, which is this endless spew.”

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The Revenant – As Edited by Manohla Dargis
George Miller made a movie this year that is little but a chase scene, with themes of
survival, revenge and a showcase for hyper violence and cinematic spectacle. The film has
virtually no story, but the nature of its editing and its use of color, movement and staging made it
an exhilarating experience, brutal and devastating, but also cathartic and purely entertaining.
1

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant is a similar revenge fantasy, stripped to its bones in
all its animalistic nature and fury, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography blunts the impact.
The Malick-esque
2
way that Lubezki
3
plays with the elements to create something spectral and
naturalistic give “The Revenant” an overstated sense of importance, and watching it is hardly
entertaining but dreary, disgusting and devoid of purpose.
Set in early frontier America, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a navigator part of a
hunting party gathering pelts. Natives ambush the entire squadron and reduce the team from 45
people to just ten.
4
The scene is ravishing, but immediately numbing. Arrows fly in and impale
the Americans from beyond the frame,
5
creating a sense early on that danger is not imminent but
seemingly omnipresent.
6
The mise-en-scene
7
is cold and silvery and makes a stark backdrop for
fiery streaks of arrows flying through the sky. Lubezki
8
has the camera dive underneath the water
to witness one man being strangled to death, and we realize that despite the camera’s pivots and
surveying, it’s more of a godly spectator rather than a human eye. The camera here is far less a

1
Cut this first paragraph
2
Malick is cinephile shorthand; You need to unpack this for the general reader.
3
You’re giving the DP a lot credit for a movie that also has a director. Don’t you think that
Iñárritu is also responsible?
4
Insert these two sentences after “animalistic nature and fury.” Start the next paragraph with,
“The scene is ravishing, but immediately numbing and the cinematography blunts the impact.”
5
“Arrows fly in from beyond the frame and impale the hunters…”
6
Nice point
7
This is best avoided in popular reviews unless you’re going to explain what you mean by
“mise-en-scene.” You could just say “the visuals.”
8
Again, you give the DP a lot of credit; too much I think – I would make it more neutral.

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gimmick than in Iñárritu’s Birdman, and the way the camera is freed from a fixed axis
1
is not
unlike how Lubezki’s cinematography floated and tumbled in Gravity.
2
But seeing it in this way
isn’t visceral but bleak, violent, bloody and full of agony.
3

Glass escapes the natives only to be attacked by a bear.
4
This scene too is an endless,
torturous and dispassionate sight done in a single, unbroken shot. The bear
5
claws and stomps on
his back and whips him like a doll. It
6
exists seemingly out of time and even ends on something
of a grim punch line, a final knife in the back as Glass tumbles down a hill only for the dead bear
to roll on top of him.
Miraculously, Glass survives, but just barely. Captain Andrew Henry
7
(Domhnall
Gleeson) demands the remaining troop care for him and keep him alive as long as possible.
When they’re unable to transport the wounded Glass further however, Henry assigns John
Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) to stay with Glass and Glass’s half-breed son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck)
until Glass dies. Instead, Fitzgerald kills Hawk and leaves Glass for dead.
8
The Revenant starts as

1
Be careful about using movie terms/ideas in a general review.
2
I would cut the reference to Gravity since, again, you’re giving a lot of credit to the DP and
because you need to explain Gravity in greater depth; for instance, that it takes place almost
entirely in outer space. You can’t assume that your reader has seen all the movies that you have.
3
Remember too that your reader hasn’t seen the movie you’re reviewing, so you need to take her
through it so that she doesn’t get lost. Think of yourself as a guide who takes the reader in hand,
telling her a story. In this case, you have left out a few important details: Glass isn’t alone – he
survives, along with his son, who you haven’t introduced.
4
Remember, he gets in the way of her and her cubs – the bear doesn’t just attack him, which
isn’t incidental to this tale of man vs. nature.
5
Digital! “The digital bear…”
6
What does this “it” refer to? The bear?
7
Who is this Captain? You need to introduce him – the leader of the hunting group or something
like that.
8
Think about whether you need all this plot description; even though the trailer gives a lot a way
it’s better to remain vague when it comes to story details. It’s a question of spoilers, of course,
but also a matter of what’s important in a review. I don’t want to read a plot description when I
read a review; I want to read film criticism – you can gesture toward the story, but try not to spell
it out in such detail.

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Glass’s fight for survival against nature, a cold look at how the world is vengeful and how the
wilderness governs all. But it eventually morphs into a more simplistic revenge fantasy, Glass’s
quest to return from the dead and kill the man who murdered his son.
We see flashes
1
of Glass’s past, of his native bride being slaughtered and skulls
2
being
stacked as high as a mountain. Except Glass’s remaining existence is no less bleak, and his past
plays as a morbid form of adding insult to injury.
3
He survives by eating hunks of bloody, raw
buffalo meat and by cutting open the guts of a horse and crawling inside its open cavity for
warmth. The film’s gore is disturbing, but the subject matter itself is not the problem. Mad Max:
Fury Road was no less shocking, and even Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back involves Luke
killing an animal for warmth on the ice planet Hoth.
4

The difference
5
is how Iñárritu lingers on the gruesomeness and screams each shot’s
importance, not for their ingenuity but their stark reality. The score pounds with thundering
drums that signal each moment’s weight, and the way The Revenant evokes God as a theme
continually burdens us with the idea that this is Glass against the world.
6

1
When do you see these flashes? Also, you should try to ease into your sentences, such as,
“Throughout, we see flashes…”
2
Animal skulls. Otherwise we might think they’re human.
3
First, who’s injury? Yours? His? Second, this is an unusual take and I would spell it out more;
for instance, the flashbacks can be seen as a way of understanding the man Glass became, how
he got to this point.
4
I would cut these references, which seem arbitrary and jarring, particularly because these
movies are such overt fantasies and The Revenant is a historical drama with a great deal of
attention paid to realistic detail. I strongly suggest that you make the same points without
bringing in other movies; sometimes it’s fine to reference other movies; but sometimes we use
these references as needless shorthand.
5
Are you now comparing this movie and those? If so, say that.
6
Good! Here you are getting into how Iñárritu makes cinematic meaning – I would suggest
trying to expand on the idea(s) in this first sentence. The reference to God is interesting and
something that you should consider expanding on; if you do, however, you should telegraph it in
your lede, so we know it’s coming.

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As a performer, DiCaprio is a victim of the film’s agony, grunting and moaning his way
through the entire film and crawling on the cold ground for much of it. There’s only so much of
an actual performance here.
1
Tom Hardy is more effective as the dissenting and ruthless
Fitzgerald, complete with a thick, broken Americana accent and wide eyes that show his
madness.
While Lubezki and his work remains the more interesting entry point to The Revenant,
the blame for the movie’s depressing and exhausting slog rests on Iñárritu’s shoulders. Like how
the film treats Glass, he does all he can to drag us through hell but little catharsis or solace to
bring us back.
2

1
This feels too abbreviated; You’re on to something, but you should amplify.
2
Great kicker, though it needs some grammatical work.

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Chapter 6: Kenneth Turan
“When people spend their hard-earned money on a movie at the end of a long work week,
all they ask is that their local critic steer them toward the good ones and help them avoid the
turkeys. It's not too much to ask. And it's a fairly simple job, once you grasp it. You get to go to a
movie first, before anyone else, and then come back and tell everybody about it. You even get to
trash it if you didn't like it.” (Cameron 1998)
This is a reductive view of film criticism, and thankfully Kenneth Turan didn’t write it.
James Cameron did, when he was attacking Turan as being out of touch, “vitriolic” and “bitter”
for giving Titanic a bad review. Except there is an element to Cameron’s argument I think with
which Turan would agree.
“I don't have to tell you, it's a big expenditure of time, and most people don't have the
time. They have other lives. They don't have the time to invest that we do,” Turan said. “I think
the most satisfying thing is when people tell me, ‘I went to that film and I loved it. I wouldn't
have gone otherwise…’ I like to send people to movies that I like. I want them to go and to like
it. I don't want them to go because I think it's good for them or that it will enhance their cultural
lives. I think they'll have a good time and will say, ‘I'm glad I saw that.’ But I don't know if
every critic thinks about that.”
Turan started as a sports writer at The Washington Post after graduating from
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He worked for two decades as a journalist before he
finally became a full time film critic at the Los Angeles Times in 1991. In addition to the Los
Angeles Times, he also regularly appears as the critic for NPR’s Morning Edition. He’s written
numerous books, including most recently a collection of essays on some of his favorite films,
Not To Be Missed: Fifty Four Favorites From a Lifetime of Film. Today he’s an adjunct
professor at USC teaching a course on film criticism, where he’s taught critics like Justin Chang,

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Amy Nicholson, and currently, yours truly.
Despite what Cameron thinks, Turan is most definitely writing for the people. He
believes a review should be clear in its language and help a person understand what a movie is
like and if it’s worth their two hours. In class he has said he always thinks, “What affect are my
words going to have on the reader?” Word choice is so important for Turan because, even a
single one can hang the reader up, and in that moment they can turn the page and be gone.
Everything, he says, has to serve the way the story is flowing. This is as true of his writing in
print as it is on the radio, where being precise about word choice is critical to listeners who don’t
have the option to go back and catch up.
Because he reaches his audience on that personal, relatable level, he’s established himself
as quite the long-standing institution in this busy film town, even though he hasn’t actually been
doing it as long as some of his peers in this book. Why else would James Cameron be calling for
his head if he didn’t have some influence? In our interview over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in
Santa Monica, the waitress even immediately knew his order as soon as he sat down.
Turan is a legacy, but he’s far from out of touch with his community.

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Full Interview with Kenneth Turan
As a professor of younger critics, what do you feel is the state of criticism today?
You would be foolish to say the outlook is good, but on the other hand it's not worse than
it's ever been.
People enjoy reading critics. They like this form of writing, that's why it's still here, and
that's why I'm optimistic about it. People seem to want to read it. But earning a living doing it is
another issue.
Do you think a lot of people want to read it, or is it more of a niche thing? I feel like a lot of
people I try to talk to think critic is a four-letter word. They see it as off-putting because
it's ruining their fun.
It's not that everyone wants to read criticism, but I think in general people do. There are
certain realities. There are people who love movies, want to know what to see, and there are too
many films for people to see. There are 15 movies a week. So a lot of people want help to try and
decide what to see, and I think that's what a critic provides. I don't find people saying you're
ruining it. X percentage of people I'm sure feel that way, but I don't know if that's a majority.
Maybe people say I just trust my friends, and if they're into movies, it's likely they read critics.
So it's not the be-all and end-all. But in today's electronic world I hear from people all around the
world. So I don't have this feeling the world is hostile. Sporadically people are hostile, but no
matter what you do sporadically people are hostile.
Do you think there's a difference between criticism and reviewing?
I don't know. It's not a distinction that means anything to me. People make it. Just,
whatever I do, I do. I don't put some label on it that "criticism" is some elevated art form and at
the bottom are "reviewers." I think we're all trying to do roughly the same thing, and it's a multi-
faceted job. You're trying to advise people whether to see the film. There's a famous book in

136
Jewish liturgy called A Guide for the Perplexed, and I sometimes think part of its function is to
be a guide for the perplexed.
There are two other functions. You're providing an engaging and entertaining piece of
writing, just as they like to read anything, be it novels or essays. Criticism, when it's well written,
is fun to read. I talk to people who say, "I don't go to the movies, but I like your reviews." The
other thing you're trying to do is enlighten people. Help them understand a movie, the director
and the world this film comes out of. I try and do a combination of those three things with every
film. Some films lend themselves to that more than others.
What's been your experience with your audience as to your influence in enabling them to
enjoy the film better?
It varies. I think long-standing critics in individual cities have influence over smaller
films. I don't have much influence over whether people see Mockingjay: Part 2 or not, but I write
them because people want to see what critics think. But with smaller films, with foreign films,
documentaries, in your individual city, with people who have read you over a number of years,
you do have an influence. And this varies from film to film. This is not a scientific business.
Also, nationwide, if critics across the country champion one small film, it's going to have
an impact. Obviously this isn't a cabal; we don't all get together and decide. But again we see
more of these smaller films than most people. I don't have to tell you, it's a big expenditure of
time, and most people don't have the time. They have other lives. They don't have the time to
invest that we do. Critics can help them wade through the jungle, and if every film critic in the
United States says to see a film, it will have an impact.
What do you think is the state of cinema today? Are critics more or less necessary because
of what's out there?

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We're getting films from countries all around the world in a way we didn't in the past. We
may be alone in this, although I may be wrong, but we have a two-tier system. We have an entire
independent world. We have a lot of films, we have theaters that specialize in them, writers that
specialize in them, festivals that specialize in them. I don't think this is going on in Italy or
Greece. We have the studio system and the independent system, not that all the indie films are
good, but the outlook is good.
If you look at the studios, the outlook is terrible. Everyone says this is not an insult, but
by and large the studios have abdicated films for thinking adults. They just don't want to do it
anymore. They make a few for the awards, but even Spotlight, that's distributed by Open Road,
not even a major studio, and that's a classic Hollywood film. 50 years ago, there's no way that's
not a studio film. But now the studios are just not interested. The audience is too risky for them,
it's hard to get them out of their houses, and they prefer the game movies, the comic book
movies, and they can push a button and there's a built-in audience. Sophisticated movies there is
no built-in audience for. They're one-offs, and one-offs make them nervous. Sometimes if they're
not really good, they die, and they don't want their films to die.
What aspects of a film are most important to communicate in a review?
I would turn that around. I would say the most important thing to communicate in a
review is a sense of the film as a whole. When people pick up a review, the basic question is,
"What's this film like? Is it worth my time?" That's finally what they want to come away with,
and I think that's a legitimate question.
What does bad criticism look like?
One thing I feel above anything else is that there really are no rules. I could tell you
something that is bad, but then I could find an example of it that I love. I don't think there's

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anything that categorically can't work. If someone is a smart enough writer or good enough
writer, they can make things work. I have liked reviews that if you had described them to me I
would say, I'm going to hate that piece of writing. But when I read it, because the writing is
strong and the person is gifted, I liked it!
Criticism is personal, but you can be too self-involved as a critic, thinking about yourself
more than communicating your ideas to other people. For me personally that's a flaw. Different
critics will have different flaws.
How about good criticism? What does that look like?
It does successfully the things I told you it tries to do. It's well written, it offers insight,
and it helps understanding. I don't know how many critics think about this, but I like to send
people to movies that I like. I want them to go and to like it. I don't want them to go because I
think it's good for them or that it will enhance their cultural lives. I think they'll have a good time
and will say I'm glad I saw that. But I don't know if every critic thinks about that.
I guess you're right, because I tend to think I write for myself.
I write for myself too. It's not like I'm this selfless person, like I'm some kind of saint.
Obviously I write for myself, but that's not the be-all and end-all. There's a famous Biblical
quote, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what good am I?"
You have to be for yourself. But if people think only about themselves and they write brilliant,
readable stuff, I'm happy. This is just what I want to be doing. This is not a judgment on other
critics. This is a hard job we all do in our own way for our own reasons. I don't think other critics
who don't do it are bad critics or bad people. I can just deal with myself, and that's enough
trouble.
How much do you want to know about a movie when you sit down to see it?

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As little as possible. On the most basic level, you want to duplicate the experience of
your audience. But also you want to judge the film on its own terms, not to what you heard. You
don't want anything in your mind of the film. You don't want any voices talking in the
background.
Is it harder to write a pan or a glowing praise?
A praise is much harder. Probably because you care about the film, you want to do it
justice, you want people to see it, and you don't want to screw it up and by their nature dismiss it.
What's your process when you sit down to write a review?
I take a lot of notes. The first thing I do is, and it's a critical step, I type up my notes. I
organize them, because my notes are a running tally of my thoughts and observations over the
course of the film. Anything that comes to mind I write it down. If I really like a performance,
I'll have comments about it all through the film, and when I type it up I put all those together. It's
a way for me to organize my thoughts. Not every critic takes a lot of notes. I print out the notes,
and I start to work.
What are some best practices that other writers should try to keep in mind in order to find
their voice?
I'm a big believer in writing a lot. You develop your voice by using it a lot and a lot of
practice. I believe in reading other critics, but just not before you write on a specific film. When I
was starting out I was reading Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. I don't write like them, but it's
interesting to see what a voice sounds like. Seeing what a voice sounds like helps to see it in
yourself.
You once said the idea of the "golden age" of criticism is bogus. Why is that, and what's
different?

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What's different is that a lot of the publications that employ critics are having trouble
staying alive. Print is in danger. It's not clear to me how that's going to play out, but people
online seem to be following the Arianna Huffington model, and they don't feel they have to pay
people. This is not good. We are still in the middle of this. I don't think this is a settled issue. But
how it's going to work out in terms of print versus online, I certainly don't know the answer to
that.
Take me through how you started out. You mentioned that it took you 20 years before you
even got to this spot or to being a critic.
I always liked journalism. I don't think journalism is necessary to being a critic, but it's
just my path. I worked at my high school paper and my college paper. I went to Swarthmore
College, then a small school of just 800 students, and it was small enough that if you were
interested in anything you could do it. You didn't have a lot of people in your way. Swarthmore
had something called the All College Movie. They had a large auditorium, and every Friday and
Saturday night, there would be a movie shown. They showed foreign language films, classic
movies like The Asphalt Jungle, and stuff that opened my eyes. I had been a movie fan as a kid,
but I didn't know about any of this stuff. I used to watch Million Dollar Movie a lot as a kid, but
Swarthmore opened my eyes to things that film could do. I got involved with the committee that
picked the All College movies, and by the time I was a senior, I would pour through catalogs and
pick the movies.
When I graduated, I always thought I would be an academic at a place like USC. I
applied to graduate school in both history and in journalism. I got accepted in both, and I really
had to decide. Being a film critic was not on my mind. I thought I would be a sports writer at that
point. I went to Columbia in New York, and Judith Crist, who was a prominent critic at the time,

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gave a seminar on reviewing. I had never really done it in any concentrated way before, and I
really enjoyed it, and she told me that I could do it. She didn't say I'll have no trouble getting a
job, but she said I was good enough.
But I always liked journalism, so I was a journalist for 20 years before I became a full
time critic. I freelanced as a critic, things like that. I worked for The Washington Post for nine
years, and I pitched in when the main critic Gary Arnold just had too many reviews to do.
How do you think being a journalist has helped your style and how you approach movies?
Doing the amount of writing you do as a journalist really helped me develop my style.
Starting as a sports writer for three years at The Washington Post, classic news writing was very
rigid, and there was no room for interesting writing, but sports writing was different. They let me
fool around with ledes and have a good time with writing. Had I been a straight news reporter, it
probably wouldn't have happened.
What are some of the challenges for writing for a daily newspaper in a film town when
there are so many trades and blogs competing for a similar space?
Writing in Los Angeles is really a wonderful thing. You have an informed, passionate
audience for film, I think as much as anywhere else. New York maybe is our rival. But in terms
of knowledge, there was a film that came out a few years ago called Coraline, and I wrote that
this was the first 3-D, stop-motion animated film. I got separate emails from people saying no it's
actually not. The first one came out in 1923. You don't get that from readers in a lot of different
cities.
Talk about writing for radio. What are some of the differences?
The ear and the eye perceive material in different ways, and writing for the ear is a
different thing. There are words that are fine in print that the ear stumbles over. You're better off

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not using them because it will stop the person cold figuring out your train of thought, and they'll
miss half the review. Sentences have to be more straight forward and something that the ear can
follow. It may sound like it's dumbing it down, but it's not dumbing it down. It's a challenge to
make your hopefully complicated thoughts work in that format.
Talk about how you go about teaching criticism to others.
I believe in learning by doing. The way the class is structured is it mirrors my daily work
as a critic. Every week, everyone reviews the same film every week. It's a film that I am
reviewing the same week for the paper. The reviews are distributed, everyone reads them, people
comment, and it's a classic workshop format. Issues arise out of that. By the end of the semester,
hopefully stuff has been imparted. But in terms of what's in my head, I don't lecture a lot. I talk
about what's happening in my review, in people's reviews and in the business. I try to make it as
close to the world that I inhabit as I can.
You've taught people like Justin Chang and Amy Nicholson. What have they gleaned from
the class?
You'll have to ask them, but one of the things they have said in the past about other
writing schools, a lot of writing schools tend to teach a uniform style, and people come out of
these programs sounding like a program. My goal really is for them to sound like the best version
of themselves, not some "ideal." We're all looking for a voice, but a voice can be very
undisciplined. The notion is to make it the best version of itself so that you're true to yourself,
but so that it reaches people as well. That's what I'm looking for when I read criticism. You make
a good point, but you need to be clearer. You're not getting at this in the best possible way. I
never say to people you're just wrong about this. Everyone has their own opinions, and that's one
thing you certainly learn, that not even your best friends will feel about films the way you do.

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What are some of the biggest mistakes that younger critics make?
The main mistake is being too full of yourself, even though it is a personal business. It
sounds paradoxical, as this is not a job for people who are shy about their opinions. But I feel
that me personally, what you're trying to do is convey your opinions in a way that other people
absorb them, benefit them and be happy to get them.
What can a writer do to set themselves apart from all the writers doing the same?
It's like saying what can Michael Jordan do to set himself apart. If you have ability...this
is not a con game where you set yourself apart. It happens if you're a good writer, and you have
to be proactive in terms of networking, trying to meet people, working with editors and looking
for freelance opportunities. But what sets yourself apart is the quality of your work. It's either
good enough or it isn't. That's a harsh thing to say. But one of the things I believe about this class
is that it makes people better. How far you get and how good you are depends on your ability in
large part. But you can make the most of your ability or you can blow it off and not pay
attention.
What gives you satisfaction about writing a review and writing criticism in general?
I think the most satisfying thing is when people tell me I went to that film and I loved it. I
wouldn't have gone otherwise. I really think for me that's the most satisfying thing and why I do
what I do for the large part. Obviously I like writing. I don't want to make myself sound like a
selfless person. I have all the ego gratifications that any writer does, but I like connecting people
to films that they would not have otherwise. No one needs a critic to go to Star Wars. But there
are a lot of smaller films like Brooklyn or Spotlight that people are not going to go to without
critics pushing them, but a lot of people will like it. That's what I find satisfying.

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Kenneth Turan Takeaways – Be The Best Version of Yourself
I’m currently enrolled in Kenneth Turan’s film criticism class at USC. In a class of seven
students once a week, we read our reviews of the previous week’s film aloud and workshop them
in a forum. The idea is that over time you improve, and through regularly analyzing and
critiquing an individual’s writing, you start to get a sense of their voice, their habits, and their
ideas in a way you wouldn’t just looking at one review.
Turan agreed to give me feedback on my reviews of Carol and Spotlight for the purpose
of this book, but he’s far more comfortable in the classroom setting, where he has an entire
semester to help you develop as a critic.
“A lot of writing schools tend to teach a uniform style, and people come out of these
programs sounding like a program. My goal really is for them to sound like the best version of
themselves, not some ideal," Turan said. “We're all looking for a voice, but a voice can be very
undisciplined. The notion is to make it the best version of itself so that you're true to yourself,
but so that it reaches people as well. That's what I'm looking for when I read criticism.”
Michael Phillips talked about being clear with specifics, and Keith Uhlich said you have
to justify every word. But with Turan that idea has finally started to stick. His writing is
approachable. Not only does he provide a service by telling readers some of the journalistic,
contextual details that people may genuinely want to know, everything in a Turan review is
written with the reader in mind. In class he’s said that if you push too hard, you’ll lose them.
Manohla Dargis said being clear with your reader comes from being honest about your
reaction, and Turan took that idea a step further in class. Forget about what a film might mean or
feeling obliged to say any one thing in particular, but you do have to say how you felt and say
something. Do what feels right for a specific film, and if the reader can feel you engaging and

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grappling with the movie instead of just describing it, you’ll discover the fine line between
boring the reader and enlightening them.
For Turan, being clear means being accurate and precise with the details of the film.
Reviews are a “guide for the perplexed,” Turan said. You need to let the reader know very
plainly, “what’s the film like and is it worth my time?” When I asked what are the most
important elements to communicate in a review, he turned the question around and said you have
to communicate the film as a whole.
In the case of Spotlight, the context provided about other journalism movies is important,
but perhaps should come later in the review rather than in the lede. Turan said part of a critic’s
job is to enlighten people, but you include those details not as a history lesson but to improve the
person’s enjoyment of actually watching the movie. And above all, you want people to see the
film, so you have to sell it through compelling writing.
“People enjoy reading critics. They like this form of writing, that’s why it’s still here, and
that’s why I’m optimistic about it,” Turan said.

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Carol – As Annotated by Kenneth Turan
Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet in Todd Haynes’s Carol has perky, rosy makeup, frayed
bangs beneath a plain black hair band, cute plaid outfits and a checkered fall hat. She looks like
one of the toy dolls in the department store where she works. Enter Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird,
who wears a movie star aura with a giant coat of golden fur, a stylish red French cap and, later in
the car, an elegant green shawl to keep her looking perfect.
1

In fact, both characters are particularly magnetic, and the attraction they form in Carol is
mutual. Carol is a coming-of-age story for the young Therese, but it’s a movie about two people
entering into separate worlds and learning to feel at home.
2
Haynes’s film is lush, poetic, and
ravishing, a stellar romance in which the unsaid words and thoughts seep into the movie’s
background and color everything.
After all, Carol is all about backgrounds. Haynes admires the patterned sewer grates in
his opening crane shot and the beads of rain on a taxicab that give the whole film an elegiac tone.
There are soothing green backdrops viewed through windows and individual stills that have
painterly beauty.
Haynes adorns these details with care
3
because the many words and themes of Carol and
Therese’s courtship go unsaid. Set in 1952, when being gay was considered a psychological
illness, Haynes avoids the thorny jargon and the explicitness of their affair. Carol and Therese
are desperate to feel close to each other, and Carol begs Therese to “Ask me, please!” They want
to speak their emotions and not have them be taboo.
Unlike the racial tension of Haynes’s other ‘50s period piece Far From Heaven, Carol is
not a social issue film. It’s a deeply personal love story; Carol’s desires are tearing her apart from

1
Interesting way to open
2
Good!
3
Not quite right

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her husband (Kyle Chandler) and her young daughter, and Therese’s uncertainty about her
sexuality complicates her relationship with a potential fiancée (Jake Lacy).
1

Mara and Blanchett have impeccable chemistry. When they first have lunch together,
Therese again echoes her innocence, with Mara ever so slightly propping herself up in her seat as
though she’s never had a cigarette before. It’s a wonderful little touch, and she as an actress
maintains the film’s mystique by never appearing too indecisive or too waifish.
2
Mara’s an
accomplished actress, but here she channels a young Audrey Hepburn’s natural graces.
Blanchett meanwhile channels just about all the rest of Old Hollywood, and slowly
reveals herself to be a flustered, hurt woman without ever losing her poise or leaving her bubble.
It’s not unlike the work she did that won her an Oscar in Blue Jasmine, but here she’s likeable
and ultimately as vulnerable as her innocent young lover.
Phyllis Nagy’s debut script from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley)
is poetic, profound and beautiful. The cinematography by longtime Haynes collaborator Edward
Lachman is dreamy. And the aforementioned costumes by three-time Oscar winner Sandy
Powell are impeccable.
But above all the technical brilliance, heed a piece of advice given to Therese: “I have a
friend who told me I should be more interested in humans.” Carol delves deep into the world of
these two human beings and finds a home.
3

1
Well put!
2
Key point
3
Very well done. I enjoyed your passion for the film.

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Spotlight – As Annotated by Kenneth Turan
Spotlight may be the only journalism movie actually about journalism.
1
All the
President’s Men, this film’s closest companion, is about seeing in the dark and finding the needle
in the haystack. Ace in the Hole is about escaping a trap through sketchy ethics and deceit. Sweet
Smell of Success is about power achieved through words, wit and gossip. Citizen Kane?
2
Well,
that’s about a lot of things.
Thomas McCarthy’s film is not a thriller, a caper, a neo-noir or a melodrama. It does not
have an ominous villain, a series of disturbing threats as the conspiracy unravels, or any suspense
set pieces. Like All the President’s Men, Spotlight is a movie of hunches, discovery, research and
hard work. The film embodies the philosophy of slow journalism, and it endlessly piles and
escalates its stakes until finally both the journalists and us have a real story. A good journalist
knows there’s always a follow-up to be had, there’s always more questions to be asked, more
digging, and Spotlight just keeps going.
3

McCarthy’s film is the story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a series of child
molestation cases among Boston priests,
4
a revelation that eventually stretched far beyond
Boston and all the way to the Vatican. The Spotlight team that uncovered the scandal started
under the prodding of their new editor-in-chief, the stoic and emotionless Marty Baron (Liev
Schreiber). A priest was accused of molestation, and there’s a suggestion that Boston’s Cardinal
Law may have known about it, leading the paper to sue the church
5
and try and find the deeper
story.

1
Nice opening
2
Too much info this high up
3
Very good
4
Feels awkward
5
Not quite right

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Michael Keaton plays Spotlight’s
1
editor Walter “Robby” Robinson, and when we first
meet him he’s giving a goodbye speech to a retiring editor just before Baron has arrived. “What
the hell do you know,” he asks jokingly. These guys can smell a story, and as his team (played
by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) starts to ask questions, their
obstacles are not only those who want to keep quiet, but their colleagues who are professionals,
who have been around and know that many of these angles have already been done.
McCarthy’s screenplay along with Josh Singer (The Fifth Estate) is so perceptive about
the journalism industry. These characters have persistence, they listen, and they constantly
clarify. One of their sources even barks at them, “Why do you keep repeating everything I say?”
And when they reveal their initial findings to senior editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), he
reacts in the same straight-faced enthusiasm the audience is thinking: “90 fucking priests?”
And yet Spotlight is so sharp and tense because it avoids the bastions
2
of many
journalism films. Truth, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford is currently in theaters, and
Spotlight never even utters the word. It doesn’t try and position journalists as noble men and
women exposing corruption and scandal; they’re just doing their job. Only occasionally do they
allow moral high ground to take over and remind themselves that kids are being raped, but time
and again they withhold reporting until the full story is told. When all is said and done, Baron
congratulates them with the praise, “A story like this is why we do this, but we have to get back
to work.”
McCarthy is more interested in the subtle ways this investigation gnaws away at these
characters’ psychology. Spotlight is a film as much about losing faith in religion and belief as it

1
Have to tell us about what “Spotlight” is
2
Is this the best word?

150
is uncovering the truth.
1
McAdams’s Sacha Pfieffer can’t look her church-going aunt in the eye
the same way. James’s Matt Carroll has a priest
2
living a block away. And Keaton’s Robinson
ultimately takes the weight of the lives at stake onto his own shoulders.
Such complexity in characters is essential for an ensemble piece like this
3
, and Spotlight
has a stellar one. Mark Ruffalo is relentless and enthusiastic in the part, but he’s calm and
likeable when doing his job, and we can feel the stress he’s exerting when he finally lets loose in
a rage. Keaton is a mile away from the bigness of his Birdman work but feels right at home,
modest and reserved but with a rumbling and subtle Boston accent that makes him feel like a
local and a veteran. Schreiber is the biggest surprise, monotone to the point that he can’t be read.
He withholds his words and hints that he’s harboring a vendetta against the church, but
Schreiber’s work is too good for us to peer inside that vault.
Spotlight is all soft shades of blues and tight, carefully constructed static shots that give
the film a docu-realistic, testimonial quality. Unlike the dark, even surreal flavor of All the
President’s Men, Spotlight is neutral in both its themes and its aesthetics.
The sting of the Catholic sexual molestation scandal has dissipated since the story first
broke. Spotlight and its shocking credits stinger will surely reignite that attention. But Spotlight
is a journalistic film about objectivity. There are still questions to be asked and work to be done.
4

1
Interesting idea
2
Not just a priest
3
Not quite right
4
Strong conclusion and an excellent review!

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Chapter 7: Claudia Puig
What does it mean that one of the last remaining daily newspapers distributed nationwide
no longer has a critic? Does that say more about the state of journalism or the state of criticism?
Claudia Puig, formerly the film critic of USA Today and currently a critic with NPR’s
FilmWeek at KPCC, is rare in the sense that she’s a female, Latina critic, a certainly select group
if there ever was one. A study by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University found that in the
spring of 2013, women represented only 22 percent of the Top Critics on Rotten Tomatoes and
wrote only 18 percent of all the reviews written between men and women. (Lauzen 2013) More
recently, an article on the Latino culture website asked, “Where Are the Latino Film Critics and
Why Do They Matter,” and cited only Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald and Nina Terrero of
Entertainment Weekly alongside Puig. (Betancourt 2016)
But Puig happens to be one of many full-time critics left out of a job by the changing
nature of 21
st
century journalism. In May of 2015 she took a buyout from USA Today, opting out
of the paper’s offer to stay on, write fewer reviews and instead write more click bait news items.
“It was really a painful decision for me because I will probably never find a job that I
love as much,” Puig said. “Those years were amazing, and I realize that job doesn't exist. So
leaving was the only thing I could do to avoid coming to dislike a job that I loved.”
Part of the reason Puig became such a staple in her 15 years at USA Today is because she
did know how to write for the masses. She acknowledges her audience is not made up of
cinephiles, and that part of her job is simply helping the average person determine how to spend
their time. Her writing is clear, never showy, always concise, and feels cheery and upbeat in the
same way she is in person.

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“It's to help people spend their free time wisely and to expose them to things to broaden
their minds, to get them thinking, talking, feeling,” Puig said. “Just the fact that you're guiding
people to choose something in our culture that is worth experiencing. That feels like a big thing.”
Puig said she had an editor outright tell her no one reads reviews. But to her and to many
she’s touched, criticism is still a big thing. While at USA Today, Puig’s reviews ran in the
Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbum, which previously aggregated Roger Ebert’s reviews. When
she left, people were so upset to see her reviews missing that the Japanese editor reached out to
her directly to continue. And days prior to our meeting at a Hollywood bakery, she had Matt
Damon approach her at a party and exclaim with disappointment, “You’re not writing for USA
Today anymore!”
In 1986, Puig was a crime and city government reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and
starting in 1993, now with two daughters, she gave up writing about shootings and drive-bys for
the safer world of entertainment reporting. In 1997 she arrived at USA Today, but it took four
more years of asking her editors and looking for people to champion her until she finally got a
shot at writing film criticism. Since leaving USA Today, she became the director of November
2015’s Napa Valley Film Festival, and naturally, she was optimistic at getting the opportunity to
learn some new skills.
Puig was still heartbroken to see what her old paper is becoming, chasing clicks and
pandering as though all Millennial women were obsessed with the Kardashians. In her reviews
however, be they positive or negative, Puig believes that unless something is truly repugnant, she
always tries to at least something nice to say.

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Full Interview with Claudia Puig
How did being a beat reporter contribute to your film criticism?
I used to tell people covering film is like covering cars in Detroit. It's the industry, and it's
a great beat. I think criticism uses a different muscle, and after I had been covering the film and
entertainment industry for a while and got to USA Today, I wanted a new challenge. I started in
'86 and went to USA Today in '97, so I had been doing reporting for 11 years. So I thought, what
can I grow into? Reporting I think is a young person's game. You're running around and going to
all sorts of events. When I was starting I was covering drive-by shootings, and when I had my
first daughter I switched to entertainment. I thought that would be a little safer. I don't need
bullets whizzing by.
But I thought I would love to review. My parents in a way were grooming me because
my dad was a big fan of foreign films by Fellini, Visconti, and Truffaut. And he would take me
to those films, and my mother was in to a lot of classic films. She sat me down to watch To Kill a
Mockingbird, so I was steeped in film-going and a love of films. It seemed like a natural segue,
but it took a few years because they already had a critic in place. And then finally one day my
editor, who was my champion, offered to let me do this and be my editor, and that was in 2001.
How can other entertainment writers get their foot in the door and nurture the
relationships in the way you did?
Everybody does it in a different way. Some have gone the film school route. Some were
filmmakers. Some were writing about the arts in another capacity. There weren't blogs before,
but you would go to work for a small paper and do it however you did it. My way was not the
usual way, and I'm not sure there is a usual way. I do know a couple of others who have gone
through journalism and beat reporting.

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My advice would be to do it as much as you possibly can, even if you're doing it for
yourself or for a very small audience. Wherever it is you can find an outlet to do it, I think you
need to use that muscle. Going to movies is an easy thing; it's just coming back and writing about
it.
I also recommend reading people you enjoy. I'm a big admirer of Joe Morgenstern. I keep
some Pauline Kael books by my bed. Even as I'm writing, if I'm stuck, I pick one of her books up
and rifle through. If I'm writing about a Western, I'll say, "Let's see how she writes about a
Western," and then I'm inspired. And her style is very different from mine. Her style is very
unique.
I was really lucky when I was at the LA Times. I had a couple of people who really tried
to help me when I was in the bureaus. There was an older guy, really old school journalist,
chomping on a cigar. And when I came in as a Latina intern, he said I was just a gimmick, the
latest thing. I thought, is this guy racist, or what? But he turned out to be a really lovely guy. And
I had this story that was just a colorful feature about quinceañeras, and as I was digging around, I
saw there were so many women in the church and community who were upset about how money
was being spent, so it turned into a more meaty story and ended up running on column one of the
front page, the first time they'd ever had an intern on the front page. And this guy stayed late
going over it with me because I was still a fledgling reporter.
So it helps to find those people and appeal to them if you have a similar interest. I
remember, I loved Robert Goldberg, and I just went in to introduce myself. He was writing
away, and he was super enthusiastic, and I went in and said, "Hi Mr. Goldberg, I just wanted to
say I was reading you since I was young," and he turned around and goes, "Come here, come
here! Look at this and tell me if this is a good lede."

155
You realize that these people are just as enthusiastic. They're not these gods that I put up
on a pedestal just because I've been reading them so long. Once you're in a place like that, then
you just pursue those people as much as possible without getting in their way. But you can do it
even if you're not in a place. You can reach out to people and just ask them about their process
and how they got there.
What is one of the most important aspects to communicate when you're writing about a
film?
The first element is reporting. I don't know if there's one most important thing. Your
description of a movie should be kept to a minimum, but sometimes you can read a description
and know immediately what it's like. Let's take Spotlight. This is about journalistic reporting on
the church scandal. But maybe someone wants to know, do we actually see priests doing
inappropriate things? Is it something I'm not going to relate to because I'm not a religious
person? Whatever it is, maybe that's where the specific description is useful in terms of a
person's taste or interest.
I've never been accused of writing a spoiler, so I'm proud of that. Readers will have said,
"You're an idiot" or "You don't know what you're talking about," but they've never said I've
spoiled the movie for them. You have to balance the need to describe the film and relate
elements like that it's super bloody or violent.
What are some films that you've had to tiptoe around that spoiler element?
Inception comes to mind. Some of these, the less I say about the plot the better. It's
almost like you're saying, "You just gotta trust me on this one. You just have to see it." And you
would explain that up front, where I don't want to say too much because it will hurt the
experience. If it's a biopic, you might say they left out this whole part about this aspect of his

156
life, and that's not a spoiler. Films that if you give away too much, you can ruin the experience
for people. I want people to experience it the way I experienced it.
One film that surprised me was Three Kings, and the way David O. Russell used color
and the saturation of the film and we hadn't seen a war film done in this way. I remember
literally sitting up a little taller in my seat, on the edge of my seat. From then I thought of that
movie as being a "sit a little taller in your seat" movie. I wanted to give away as little as possible,
but I wanted to emphasize that this is very different.
You don't use a formula. Each film is different. The ones that are the toughest to review
are the mediocre films, the ones where you describe it to your friends and you go, "eh." Pans and
praises are the easiest because they're at the extremes. Praises can be hard because you're trying
to find new ways to say "great" or "fantastic." That was the case last year with me with Boyhood.
There was so much I thought that was amazing, but saying that it's a boy growing up across 12
years, that doesn't capture it. If you say we've never seen it on screen, you can say we've seen it
on TV. It was a really tough one to express my admiration for. But it's also challenging to write a
fair, middling review. It's easy to explain in detail if something is awful. There is a whole list of
reasons as to why something is awful. But where something missed is more of a challenge. And
the vast majority of movies are mediocre.
How much do you want to know when you sit down to see a film?
As little as possible. I always say I wish there was a way to know less. Unfortunately you
usually know who's in it and who the director is. Sometimes I wish I didn't know who the
director was. You can't help but have certain directors that you love and don't love, and not that it
biases you, but it might set you up for a certain level of expectation. If I know I love Ang Lee
and then I see Woodstock and then it's not Crouching Tiger, it makes me sad. It makes me

157
doubly disappointed and I don't want to be harsher on it. If some random guy I've never heard of
had done Woodstock, I still wouldn't have liked it, but I might've looked at it different because I
know what this guy is capable of.
What do you feel often gets left out of criticism among younger writers?
Context about the person's previous film or film history. I'm guilty of it too. It's part of
what film is to say how it compares to other films, how it fits into genre. That can get left out for
space reasons. But I don't even like to talk about actors’ other work, like how much a
performance relies on other work, because that can easily get cut out by an editor.
When I was a TA at Annenberg and I would grade the papers for the undergrads, when
you're grading somebody, always look for something positive. You can lead off with it. So I try
to at least have something positive to say, unless the movie is offensively bad, then forget it.
What's your process when you sit down to write a review?
Some movies it's all in your head, you sit down to write and it's just bang bang bang.
Other movies require cogitation. It has to marinate verbally in your head for a few days. Some of
it is just logistical. A movie won't screen until two nights before it opens, so you don't have that
luxury to let it marinate. For the most part, if a certain kind of movie has a depth to it, I want to
let it roll around in my head a bit. I write notes and can always go back and add more. If I'm
driving and thoughts are coming to me over the course of a few days, I'll dictate things and then
put it all together and write it.
What are some best practices young writers can keep in mind?
Again, reading as much as you possibly can. Not just criticism, but just read. Read non-
fiction, read fiction. Talk to people. Talk to smart people, and take smart people with you to the
movies to discuss it with you on the way home. Have debates about them. That's not hard to do,

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but in other eras where it was rude to get into an argument about something, now it's very
frequent.
I do think if you can read as little about a movie, that's best because your reaction will be
pure. There's one debate I've had with Leonard Maltin, which is, whether or not to read a book
that's being adapted to screen. I'm a big reader, so fortunately, I read Brooklyn years ago. I can't
unread that. It's in my head. There are certain things I would never read, like Fifty Shades of
Grey. With The Da Vinci Code, I made a point to read it two days before because I know people
want to know how they compare. I tried to do it with Fifty Shades of Grey, but I just couldn't.
Sorry! Maltin believes you shouldn't because it's a different work. But I feel you can still judge
on the basis of what it is, and I think in a lot of cases people want to know.
USA Today is a very populist paper; it's not a film journal, it's not what a cinephile is
going to necessarily read. There may be cinephiles reading it, but also the average Joe Blow. So I
think one of my jobs is to be a consumer-oriented job. Let people know, this is what you're
spending your money on, is this like the book? Those basic things based on the publication are
important.
Talk more about writing for that type of audience, or the "masses."
There are times when I want to review something a little more obscure, and they'll say
there's no room for that. There are always constraints of who you write for. Documentaries,
foreign films, I have to fight for. But if you open the paper today, they're not reviewing anything,
which breaks my heart. In many ways I was a good person to do that, because although I know
more than the average person, I didn't go to film school, and what I've learned is as an aficionado
and not a person who is trained in film. It's not like I have to talk down or dumb myself down to
do this, which some people might do if they had this arcane knowledge of film.

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You've now left USA Today, so how does being at a new publication arguably change your
style or how you would approach writing a review?
I do FilmWeek at NPR and I freelance for a Japanese newspaper called Asahi Shimbum.
My work gets translated, I don't speak Japanese, and I can only hope that it reads well. If people
read it and go, "This woman can't write," not my fault! My reviews used to run there when I was
at USA Today, and before that they ran Roger Ebert's reviews. When he died, they asked, "Can
we run Claudia?" When I left USA Today, apparently people were upset and still wanted to read
my reviews, so they came to me directly.
It hasn't changed my style any. I've met the woman who edits my work, and she has a
good grasp of English, but I always wonder if they'll understand a certain turn of phrase. It
makes me conscious of using certain expressions that might not be easily translatable. So it has
slightly modified my writing.
Do you have an influence with your audience?
It's hard to know that because until you run into people, I'm always surprised that I have
had any influence. When you're writing, you're in a room, in a vacuum, and you don't know. But
I was in a screening and had these two guys sitting next to me, and one of them said, "You know
who I really like is Claudia Puig." That’s weird. I've never had this happen before! I've had
random people come up to me, or I'll interview an actor and they'll say I read you all the time. I
met up with Matt Damon at a party and he said, "You're not at USA Today anymore! Are you
still reviewing?" He paid attention. And he was really upset, or at least he was acting upset
because he's an actor. It was really nice. You realize you do have an influence, and people have
said I should write a blog, so I probably will.
Do you think the public values criticism?

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Not as much as they used to I think. With the plethora of voices, it's hard to make your
voice heard over the cacophony of voices. The aggregate is valued. They want to know that
something got 93 percent on the TomatoMeter, but do they know what Kenny Turan said about
it? That they look at that aggregate number means something.
I think it matters to a certain degree in the aggregate. With the death of Roger Ebert, that
"one critic" phenomenon is gone. He was the one that everyone knew. When I would tell people
who didn't really understand what it is to be a film critic and I would explain what I do, they'd
say, "Oh, like Roger Ebert?" I don't think anyone has taken his place, and I don't know that
anyone ever will.
I don't know if the individual critics make a difference, but I think the aggregate do, and
maybe what the LA Film Critics choose will make a difference at the studio or at the box office.
I had someone tell me years ago about the movie Half Nelson with Ryan Gosling. It was before
Ryan Gosling was Ryan Gosling. I wrote a rave review. Loved it. I said, “Come Oscar time this
guy should be on people's radar,” and Lisa Schwarzbaum also called out his performance. When
he later did get an Oscar nom, the guy who ran the studio said, "It was started by you and Lisa."
You think, maybe I can make a little difference. But it's not the kind of difference that Pauline
Kael, James Agee or Roger Ebert did.
What did they do on an individual level that we don't see as much?
I just think there were fewer critics. Not taking anything away from either of them, but I
think there were just fewer. I would argue Joe Morgenstern is just as good a critic. Manohla
Dargis is fantastic. Manohla could be the new Pauline Kael. The problem is, there are just that
many more voices. Pauline Kael was writing at a time when there were fewer critics. And I think

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people paid more attention to the written word maybe. I don't see anyone filling those shoes. It's
not the level of criticism; it's just the times.
What do you think is the state of film criticism today?
More writing. There probably is more good writing today just because there is more
writing that allows it. There's a lot more bad and mediocre writing too. One of the problems is
it's not as valued by publications. As newspapers are dying and things are becoming more and
more digital, it's all about what gets the clicks, and they say reviews don't get the same clicks as a
story about the Kardashians or about whatever. If you're all about what gets the clicks, then you
end up with people getting laid off.
At my paper, first there were three critics, then there were two critics, then there was one
critic, and now I would argue there is no critic.
What does that mean that one of the biggest national papers in the country doesn't have a
film critic?
It all comes down to sensationalized, non-thoughtful analysis and criticism. It's either
perceived by the powers that be that it's not as popular, or it really isn't. I've had an editor say no
one reads reviews. And yet I run into people all the time who know my name and read my
reviews. And people lamented when I left. I have no idea how many people read my reviews.
But it comes down to the perception by the media companies as to what gets the clicks.
Our paper came right out and said, "We are focusing on Millennial women." I have two
daughters. They're Millennials. They would never read our paper. They would never read the
stuff that's put out there. It's an insult to Millennials and Millennial women particularly. It used
to be catered to businessmen, and that perception of what caters to businessmen or to Millennial
women is what you see in the paper.

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What do you think young writers can do to boost the perception of criticism to make it
more meaningful?
Just write quality, and maybe don't click on those other things. I was talking to a guy at
Indiewire, and he was up for a job at The Huffington Post and told them right up front, "I don't
want to write about the Kardashians." And they just assumed that because he was 28 that he
would want to. So defy those assumptions. Don't be that person that they think. 50-year-olds
don't know what a 25-year-old wants to read. Just write good stuff, don't click on the crap, and
maybe things will change back over.
What led to the decision to leave USA Today?
That, basically. I was seeing the direction things were going, and in the last final year that
I was there, I had two really good friends who were let go, and they were arguably the best
writers we had in our section. Edna Gunderson, our pop music critic for years, when U2 has a
concert, Bono calls her backstage, or Paul McCartney calls her directly. Those kinds of things
weren't valued that she was respected in the industry she covered. Scott Bowles too, my
colleague, super smart guy and an excellent writer. They were both let go. Neither of them were
tweeting, they wanted to write important, smart stuff, and when that happened a lot of us were
really shaken up. I don't tweet a lot, but I have a Twitter, so I wasn't axed, but we all felt like we
had targets on our backs.
Then this opportunity came up of a buyout. A lot of us took it. I agonized over it. I went
back and forth, and I talked to everyone there, I did lots of due diligence, and it came down to
talking to my editor and she said, "well you'll be doing fewer reviews and more of the quick hit
things," and after 30 years in journalism, I can't do that. So it was really a painful decision for me
because I will probably never find a job that I love as much. Those years were amazing, and I

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realize that job doesn't exist. So leaving was the only thing I could do to avoid coming to dislike
a job that I loved.
Is film criticism a career still? Was it ever?
It was, but now I don't know. I've seen so many friends before me...I could name dozens
of people who are no longer working as critics. So it's less of a career. If you get in the right
place, like Joe Morgenstern, he's very lucky. His paper is a very specific animal, and he doesn't
have to do that other stuff.
We came up with doing videos. I'm perfectly happy with having to do videos. And I'm
not unhappy to tweet, I just don't want to be writing crap. So I'm perfectly happy to change with
the times and do whatever it takes, and I feel happy that I learned how to do short videos. It's not
a matter of not changing, you do have to change, but you have to maintain your integrity and not
dumb yourself down and become part of the cacophony of crap that is out there.
I saw this piece in the paper about Miley Cyrus's pink armpit hair, and it used to be blue.
This was news. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. And then I turned on
Entertainment Tonight and they were talking about Miley Cyrus's pink armpit hair. It wasn't like
this was even an exclusive! Everyone's saying the same thing and it's just lame. The more that
happens, the more not just film criticism but real journalism suffers. There's always going to be a
need for real journalism, whatever form it takes. But it's going to take the form of Snowden or
any number of other ways of breaking news that are not the traditional outlets like newspapers.
Criticism could go that way too I suppose.
What do you say to a person like me who still has dreams of becoming a critic? What do
you say to that person?

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I don't say don't do it. I say give it your all. But be prepared to do other things. The other
advice I would give is, be able to do lots of things. Ten years ago I started doing the radio show,
and it was one of the wisest decisions I ever made. Also doing video work, I realized I can do
that. Diversify yourself as much as you can. If you want to be a film critic, don't just think online
or publications. Think about radio or whatever kind of medium is out there.
And have a Plan B. I would hate to think that criticism would disappear, but it's changing,
and we're in the midst of a sea change right now, so it's hard for me to predict where it's going to
go, same as anybody. But I think it's always smart to have a Plan B. I may end up going back to
journalism. Who knows?
It's just good to have as many skills as possible. It will never hurt you to have writing
skills. It will never hurt you to have analytical skills or critical thinking. Those are things that
will be useful in whatever you do, so I wouldn't be pessimistic about it. Just be mindful that it's
tough.
How did you settle on the Napa Valley Film Festival, and what was that experience like this
year?
One of the perks of my job is that I was asked to be on film festival juries over the years.
It took a few years of me reviewing first, but I've been on amazing juries and traveled all over
the world as a juror. I love to watch movies that I may never get to see or review. I take my
vacation time to do it, and people ask why, and I say, "Are you kidding? I love movies, and I get
to watch them in Switzerland? This is perfect!" To me it was a total win-win, and I was able to
be aware of new filmmakers. The way doctors and lawyers have continuing education in their
field, that's what film festival jurying was for me. Sometimes you get so busy when working for
a daily newspaper. There are just so many movies opening each week, you're just working

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constantly, and you don't get enough time to watch movies you'd never review. It was my way of
continuing my education of broadening my knowledge.
This got me thinking that it would be fun to work for a film festival. I had gone to Napa
as a juror, and I was trying to think of what my second act would be, and critics before me have
made that transition. You're championing films, which you do as a critic, you're curating films,
and you are trying to get them out to an audience. So it's a very similar ethos I guess. The
difference is you're organizing the event in addition to championing films. It seemed like a good
enough opportunity and it was close enough to LA that I could keep my contacts. Overall it was
a really good experience. Do I love it as much as writing film reviews? No.
Being on the other side of the fence, it must be a learning experience.
The learning experience was great. You want to keep learning just as a human, and I've
been a journalist for 30 years. It was time to learn new skills. You don't want to ever get stuck. I
found it really invigorating intellectually and professionally to do it. And it has led to these other
contacts. It's a really good way to meet people doing interesting things.
You're in a very small, select group as a woman, Latina film critic. So what has been your
experience in that regard and how it shapes your reviews?
Of course you write as a woman, and you bring all your experiences to it. My being a
woman and Latina is part of my compilation of who I am. It's not a specific thing that you bring
to it, as if I love Alfonso Cuarón movies or Iñárritu movies. In fact last year I preferred a white
guy from Austin's movie over the Mexican's movie. But you do have an awareness. It's more like
how you watch movies. Sometimes there is very subtle, and sometimes not so subtle sexism in
movies. Let's take a movie like The Big Short. It's a movie made up entirely of men, and as far as

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I can remember, the one woman really prominent in it is Margot Robbie in a bath tub. It's
intentional sexism in a way, but this is still a movie made up of men.
Take the Bechdel Test. Those things are valid. Women are often wives and girlfriends, if
they're cast at all. Meryl Streep's criticism is absolutely valid: if you have more parity and more
people pointing to those things, then consequently maybe that will have some influence on the
way films are made. Maybe a white male filmmaker will be more mindful of the fact that all the
people in the movie are white males or all the women are girlfriends. It's not as though my
review specifically is going to do anything, but if there are more women and people of color in
the ranks, that's going to influence the eventual product.
Have you received more criticism and hate because of your gender?
Every woman will tell you that. Guys will say, oh you just hate comic book movies. No I
don't! I hate chick flicks, and I hate the movies that are "aimed" directly at me. The fact that
filmmakers think they're targeting a demographic is stupid. If you listen to my reviews you'll see
I hate chick flicks more than comic book movies. Maybe it's just more comic book geeks. I'm
sure women disagree with me, but maybe they're just not as virulent about it.
What do you think is the job of a critic?
The job of the critic is in some ways to educate and generally nudge and direct people to
films that are worth seeing. I don't just mean lofty, worthwhile films that are going to educate
you. They could make you laugh, and they could be stupid. Stupid good. There's stupid funny
and stupid stupid. Stupid funny is like Zoolander. Stupid stupid is any Adam Sandler movie. So
my job is to direct the reader to expand their minds. Maybe they don't want to see something
stupid or a chick flick or a comic book movie, but you need to point out there are good things in
all genres. Be more open-minded.

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At the end of the day there are a lot of great ways to spend your time. There's a lot of
great TV out there, probably more great TV than there are movies. There are fantastic books to
read, there are great hikes to take or time to spend with your children or your dog. It's to let
people know, "this is worth your two hours. This is not worth your two hours. This isn't even
worth your five minutes." It's to help people spend their free time wisely and to expose them to
things to broaden their minds, to get them thinking, talking, feeling.
What gives you satisfaction about writing criticism?
As a writer it's sometimes just a well-turned phrase. I said that exactly the way I wanted
to say that or I got this idea across. Probably more than anything it's hearing from readers. "I
wasn't going to see this movie, but I really liked it. I agree with you." Just the fact that you're
guiding people to choose something in our culture that is worth experiencing. That feels like a
big thing.
What last piece of advice would you give to young writers looking to find their voice?
Not to keep beating the same drum, but read. Read read read. Have conversations with
smart people. Watch everything. Watch as much as you can. See something that you think you
might not like, that might be obscure and that might be off your ordinary radar, and then read
what people say about it. Go to film festivals if you can.
And write. Be doing as much writing as you can. If you don't have an audience, use your
smart friends as your audience, and make sure you get good feedback. Read, write, talk, watch,
and maybe think a little outside the box. There aren't many Joe Morgensterns, but there may be
new ways to talk about film that are out there. Don't close any doors, especially starting out.
Don't worry about getting paid too much, because even if you get to a level of Turan or
Morgenstern, you're never going to get rich, so you have to love it. You'll be fine if you get to

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that point, and it may take a while to get to that point, but you'll never be rich. If you have a
screenplay in you and want to make films, then do that. But if you really are certain that you
want to be a critic, don't rule out being a critic of other things. Be as open and receptive as
possible. And let people know. For me, it took people a few years to see me in that role, but they
did. And I feel very grateful that they did.

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Claudia Puig Takeaways – Maintain Your Integrity
Miley Cyrus’s pink armpit hair was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Previously, Miley’s hair was blue. This apparently was news. Claudia Puig picked up a USA
Today, saw this “news” item and was crestfallen. Then she turned on a TV and saw the same
story.
“It wasn't like this was even an exclusive! Everyone's saying the same thing and it's just
lame,” Puig said. “The more that happens, the more not just film criticism but real journalism
suffers.”
Puig said if you want to get into film criticism, you need to have a Plan B, and her story
is proof. There will always be constraints based on the publication for which you write. The
industry moves rapidly today, faster than anyone knows how journalism will shake out, but at
any point in history, there’s always a need to change with the times. Puig’s Plan B of journalism
and film festivals may not be for you. But Peter Labuza said that you don’t have to be a critic or
a writer to be a cinephile. Study the world more broadly beyond film history and criticism. You
can brush up on the movies any time, and make your Plan B a passion that will still allow you to
give back to the film community.
“I'm perfectly happy with having to do videos. And I'm not unhappy to tweet, I just don't
want to be writing crap,” Puig said. “It's not a matter of not changing. You do have to change,
but you have to maintain your integrity and not dumb yourself down and become part of the
cacophony of crap that is out there.”
Puig’s comments on my review of the Italian drama Youth are all about maintaining
integrity in your writing. Watch instances of repeated words in close proximity (the word
“floated” cropped up twice within a single paragraph). Be careful to avoid spoilers (Youth has a
touchy twist that required some clever wordplay to get around). And do everything you can to

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preserve the piece’s flow. Cut what you can, and break up longer sentences with punchy, shorter
ones (“It can give it almost a musical rhythm”).
The real value though of speaking with Puig was in finding a mentor, as has been the case
with all the critics interviewed for this book. Like Puig, I came to realize in speaking with
everyone that none are, “these gods that I put up on a pedestal just because I’ve been reading
them so long.” Puig said these people are just as enthusiastic as you are (which may be even
more true within criticism), and you need these champions in your career. Talk to smart people,
take them to the movies, get feedback, have debates, and above all find people in your industry
looking out for your best interest.
“Read, write, talk, watch, and maybe think a little outside the box,” Puig said. “There
aren't many Joe Morgensterns, but there may be new ways to talk about film that are out there.
Don't close any doors, especially starting out.”

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Youth – As Edited by Claudia Puig
No filmmaker is more of a modern day Fellini than Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino.
1
His
films are opulent wonders, but while his extravagant visual style has for some become a sensory
overload, it was Sorrentino reckoning with that same opulence in his last film, the Oscar winning
foreign language film The Great Beauty, that made that film’s fantasy a welcome escape.
With Youth, the colorful set dressing places us in a dream state. Like his previous English
language film This Must Be The Place, Youth is a movie about aging artists in their twilight
years, and it grapples with ideas of memory and love across lucid dreams and nightmares, as well
as the more practical reality of old age. It’s enchantingly lush, abstract and fascinatingly stylized,
but the self-indulgent cinematic flourishes aren’t as central to the narrative as Sorrentino made
possible with The Great Beauty.
The film is set in a luxuriously fantastical hotel and spa in the Swiss Alps, where the
legendary English composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and American film director Mick
Boyle (Harvey Keitel) holiday over the summer. Fred is approached by an emissary to the
Queen, who would like for him to come out of retirement and conduct a performance of his
“Simple Songs,” arrangements that made him famous but that he considers trifling.
2
But his
reasons for his retirement and his apathy are personal, and Caine plays Fred as guarded, a little
jaded, but still in good spirits as he waits out his life. Mick has recruited some young, hipster
screenwriters to pen his last film and swan song, which he calls Life’s Last Day. But Fred and
Mick together rarely talk work or feelings, instead one-upping the other on how few drops they

1
I like the beginning and the end a lot. Those are two things that are really important. If you say
someone is a latter day Fellini, people are going to want to read that. And a lot of people don't
pay attention to the end, but I think it's really nice to wrap something up.
2
I think this is a little too long of a sentence. I would break it up. Because you have "but" and
then you have "but" again in the next sentence. That's the kind of thing that maybe another edit
you would've gotten yourself. This is a flow thing, but if you're going to write long sentences,
break it up into shorter sentences. It can give it almost a musical rhythm.

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got out going to the bathroom that morning, or reminiscing about an old flame they both had a
crush on.
1

Fred and Mick’s conversations about pissing are amusing, but not without merit. These
daily tasks, along with the entirety of their life’s work, take tremendous effort, yet produce an
often modest result, Fred says. At his age, Fred can still conduct with grace, leading an orchestra
of cows in nature in a beautiful aria, but what is the point of creating memories if we know we’ll
lose them?
Fred is burdened by the loss of his wife Melanie, and his daughter and assistant Lena
(Rachel Weisz) tries to encourage him to leave this hotel and at least leave flowers for the first
time in 10 years.
2
But no one is leaving this place. And how could you, when everything is so
gorgeous?
Young and old, supporting characters color the decorum of this hotel, and Youth becomes
less a movie driven by its plot and more by its contemplative assessments of character. There’s
Jimmy Tree, a brooding artist of Christian Bale’s caliber with Johnny Depp’s oddities and facial
hair, and yet played by Paul Dano.
3
Like Fred, Jimmy played a robot in a mindless entertainment
and has his other artistic achievements virtually erased among the people who recognize him.
Another is a Spanish football star with a giant tattoo on his back that has made him into
something of a messiah figure. He now has a giant gut, but can do wonders with a tennis ball.

1
I think you give just the right amount of description here. Maybe I would've done just a tiny bit
less, but you're using it to bolster what does and doesn't work, which is exactly how you should
use the description of the movie's plot. This particularly works well because you come to realize
the substance of what these guys have.
2
This is interesting how you do this because she wasn't really dead. That's one of those where I
would've danced around it a little more. If you say it a different way, it implies that she's alive, so
it's a tough one. He has lost her, but when you say you lost someone that implies death. But at
least you're not spoiling the surprise by saying she has Alzheimer's.
3
I love the way you describe Dano's character because it gives you a perfect image. I love the
idea of describing someone by who they remind you of. It helps someone get a vivid picture.

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One sophisticated couple never speaks a word at dinner, each of them seething at what this
marriage has become. And even Miss Universe makes an appearance, becoming a literal bathing
beauty to further pull us into this dream world.
1

Sadly these characters are just coloring, with Sorrentino perhaps showing too unhealthy
of a fixation on the female, and sometimes male, body,
2
and it takes Jane Fonda channeling an
ultimate diva to yank us back to reality. Youth is at its best when Caine, Keitel, Weisz and Dano
are all being bluntly honest with one another. The four, along with Fonda in her scene stealing
moment, are all as good as they’ve been in years. They act their age; they have chemistry and a
personable quality that grounds them in this free-floating film.
3

It can’t be said enough how gorgeous and elegant Youth looks. The Great Beauty had a
shot that literally tipped the camera on its head, and Youth begins in a similar fashion.
Sorrentino’s opening shot places us on a revolving stage, always disorienting his audience and
placing us in a reverie without knowing why. And another seems almost impossible, with the
camera rising out of a pool and then seamlessly floating
4
overhead to the soccer star sunbathing.
But unlike The Great Beauty, the majesty of Youth is in the simpler story at its center, and the
dreamy mise-en-scene is at best lovely but at worst distracting. Jane Fonda’s diva actress sums it
up best: “Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit.”
5

1
I think the review could be tightened a little bit. If you were to cut something out, maybe it’s
that Miss Universe makes an appearance.
2
I love this a lot. That’s always worth noting too.
3
You're talking about who stands out and why, and you're also talking about this being a very
free-floating film. You're doing a lot in that one sentence, which is good.
4
You do use "floating" twice. Sometimes you just want to find the synonym for something. I've
caught myself and I can feel it's lazy. There are so many words in this English language.
5
I'm always looking for a quote that's going to sum up a movie. I take a lot of copious notes
during a movie. One is to keep me focused and not let my mind drift ever. I do it to find those
little turns of phrases that either sum up the movie or point out why the dialogue is so terrible or
so brilliant, to back up what you're going to say.

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Chapter 8: Keith Phipps
The Dissolve was not any film site but the destination place for film. What Pitchfork (not
coincidentally the owners of The Dissolve) did for music, The Dissolve did for the movies in two
years time. Like The A.V. Club before it, The Dissolve’s Editor-in-Chief Keith Phipps and
company built a website for those who were deeply passionate about film and those younger
readers who want to absorb as much as possible. The writing was funny, educational, thoughtful,
and accessible, even when writing about obscure subjects. On a given day you could read a
review of the latest release, a provocative think piece on gender, a comprehensive staff analysis
of a classic film, a roundup of great criticism from across the web, or a goofy reassessment of
Space Jam. No publication had a nicer, smarter, more respectful comment section. An entire
tribute website called The Solute popped up out of the comment boards. Established critics and
emerging writers found an audience and an outlet for their passion projects that would’ve never
been published elsewhere. The site meant so much to so many people, myself included, that on
Film Twitter it felt like someone died (writers penned actual eulogies) when The Dissolve folded
in July 2015.
In November of 2014, I interviewed with Phipps for The Dissolve’s news editor
position. Especially for being based in Chicago, working there was a dream job if there ever was
one. Not only did I get an initial interview and the chance to meet with many of my film critic
idols, I earned a callback before I could even drive home to the suburbs. Phipps even
accidentally sent me an internal email with a list of the final three candidates. I could taste how
close I was, and it stung all the more to have missed out. When The Dissolve closed, I had
already been accepted to grad school at USC, an opportunity I likely would have overlooked had
I won the job, and I felt an immense depression. Some of my favorite critics, writing for what

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was by far my favorite website, were now out of a job, and I want to go to school to learn how to
do this?
Within a few weeks of The Dissolve shuttering, I bumped into Phipps and Dissolve critics
and contributors Scott Tobias and Noel Murray at a screening and reintroduced myself. Phipps
said I was probably lucky that I wasn’t hired, which I took with a grain of salt. And when asked
if I would want to come back to Chicago or remain out in Los Angeles, Tobias chimed in and
said in a defeated tone, “Stay out there. There are no jobs here.”
Phipps attended grad school for English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but
found more interest working at a local video rental store called Four Star Video Heaven. He
absorbed the movies, and in 1997 became an assistant editor at the still young A.V. Club. In 2004
he became its editor until leaving to form The Dissolve in 2013. He now works as the film and
TV editorial director for Uproxx and will surely help develop that site into something important
for film.
I read The A.V. Club virtually everyday throughout college. I loved the site’s fascination
with everything pop culture and the writers’ sense of humor. I kept coming back to them because
they had a brand and a voice, and The Dissolve did the same several years later. Together these
sites taught me much of what I know about film and how I approached reviews. I wanted to
interview Phipps because I have to believe he was very much responsible for shaping the critic I
am today.
But secondly, Phipps is not only a film critic but also an editor, something I also aspire to
become. Phipps helped build the brands of these sites that meant so much to me, and he’s been a
part of grooming and nurturing the talent that has come through each publication over the years.

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In speaking with him in a coffee shop in northern Chicago near his home, I could tell the
wound of The Dissolve’s closing was still fresh. But I most wanted to know at this complicated
point in his career what film criticism meant to him.

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Full Interview with Keith Phipps
In addition to being a critic, you're an editor and editorial director. So when you're
working with other critics, what rises to the top? What do you look for?
I often end up doing the most work on the beginning and ending of pieces. If the reader
doesn't grab me in the lede, I'm less likely to read it. And I also feel like you should say what you
want to say in the first paragraph. That's just basic writing advice, but I've found that it still needs
to be tended to at every level, and when people edit my pieces, that's often true as well. So start
and end well, more than anything else.
The last few months have been a transition where I had developed one sort of voice I
worked with at The A.V. Club and carried over to The Dissolve, and coming over to Uproxx, I've
been dealing with a lot of different voices. My first instinct is to get everyone in line with what I
always want, and now it's more like, let's bring out the very best possible version of these voices.
How much do you want to know about a movie when you sit down to see it?
I like to know as little as possible, but I'm in a position now where I have to edit pieces
about trailers. I try to avoid them for the most part, but I don't like to ever be lost, and I usually
have to look at IMDb to see who's in it, because I'm not great with names and faces sometimes.
If I'm watching a film and saying, "Who is that" I'm going to be distracted from what's actually
happening in the film, especially now that opening credits are much less common.
In an ideal world I like to have seen the director's other films. In the world that we live in,
that's often a luxury. Obviously you accumulate that over the years. But I've never seen a Paolo
Sorrentino film at this point, and I need to catch up badly. But now I'm five films behind instead
of one film behind.
What aspects of a film are most important to communicate?

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I've always written for a general readership. People want to know about the story and
about the plot. I try to do as little plot as possible, but you have to let people know what the
movie is about. I'm not even an expert on film style, but I find that stuff is important. I think in
order of importance, what is this film, what happens in it, is it any good? For a general
readership, that's what you need to do. The beauty of it is to bring in other context and analysis
as you can as possible. What has this director done before? How does this fit into the context of
his or her work? And then in so far as you can talk about style. Too much and you're going to
lose it. But if I leave a review with no sense of what it looks like, what the style is, what the
mood is like and how the director uses the language of movies, I feel like I've been a little
cheated.
I feel like The Dissolve reviews, and especially Pitchfork for music, there's so much context
that goes into those. Is that something you consciously write in a way that other critics
don't?
At The Dissolve, I always assumed the readership was a smart, general film readership,
not necessarily film experts but people who were passionate about it. I think some reviews could
use a little more table setting and a little less assumptions that people already know. At The A.V.
Club and Dissolve, I always assumed a slightly younger readership. I always wanted to write like
what I wanted to read when I was 15 to 25 when I was first discovering everything for the first
time. I wanted to be a good publication for that audience.
What context do you feel is left out of other reviews that you look at?
One of the things young critics do is to not put in context and background. One virtue of
age is that by sticking around long enough you see enough to at least have some idea to know
what you're talking about. I was complaining with a fellow writer of a trend of younger writers to

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trumpet, "I don't know that much. This is all new to me." Well why do I want to read you in that
case?
There is that fine line to walk between honesty and admitting your naïveté.
I think of the reviews I wrote when I was young, it was mostly jokes and quips and those
sort of things. But you have to get past that at a certain point.
What are the challenges of planning meaningful film coverage while still catering to that
general audience?
To know that there's going to be a lot more people reading about The Force
Awakens and The Hateful Eight and make sure that audience is served without neglecting the
other stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. I want to read about The Force Awakens and The
Hateful Eight, but hopefully they stick around to read about Son of Saul as well.
What did you find at The Dissolve with how people flocked to that smaller stuff?
Well, they didn't flock.
We never had a large enough audience to attract advertisers, which is ultimately what did
us in. That may have been our fault, it may have been a business plan, but at this point I don't
care. It was a great chapter that happened. But we did try.
There's a new trailer to a big movie, let's put it out on social media. We're going to do
coverage when The Avengers came out. Make sure we have a review. Make sure we have a
thoughtful essay. Make sure we have news items. Make sure the tentpole stuff is covered, and
hopefully people hang around and read some more.
What I loved about The Dissolve is that it had that vibe of being a place for film lovers. Do
you think film is still meaningful to a lot of people? Did The Dissolve help cultivate those
people who were really passionate, or was it just a small niche?

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We got a really good audience of people who really cared about it. My attitude is always
it's a site for people to look at what to see this weekend, what's on demand, but also for people
who wanted to do a deep dive into later Fellini movies. We had those people covered too. We got
that right in the audience we attracted, and we had a really passionate commenter base that still
exists on Facebook and The Solute, which is a Dissolve tribute site. Commenters started it even
before we folded. I think in time it would've grown, I really do. But who has time these days?
In your closing article, you wrote, "Keep watching, reading and discussing the movies. It
matters." Why do you feel that is?
We have to examine. Not looking at culture, not looking at what it says about us, not
looking at what it's doing, not looking at what it does well? Whether it's Star Wars or Son of
Saul, these are movies that say something about who we are and how we see the world. These
things stick around. This generation growing up with Star Wars, what are we telling them? What
are the messages in this film? Son of Saul has a similar, interesting generational question. These
are interesting things to discuss.
Being a Chicago critic, what are some of the challenges compared to competing with New
York and LA?
Let me tell you the advantages first. I feel like it's a great film town, and it would've been
even without Ebert, but Ebert's stamp is still on the city.
But as someone told Scott the other day, the screenwriter of Me and Earl and the Dying
Girl was at a party in LA and was hoping to talk to him. We don't run into that here. Maybe Joe
Swanberg or something.

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Sometimes I'm a little bit of a snob about the Midwest. So many people live here, and so
many people involved in the movies live here. It's not all about the coasts. And yet on the other
hand, it kind of is all about the coasts.
Working with Mike Ryan in New York, my attitude is to run the review when the movie
opens and when people can see it, and his attitude is, run the review as soon as the embargo
breaks because that's the only time people are going to read it. And he's right, actually, or
unfortunately. I wish it was the other case, but I've learned that being there as soon as people can
read it is a big deal, and the only way you can do that is to be at the earliest possible screenings,
and the only way you can get into the earliest possible screenings is to be in New York or LA. If
I was starting out now and wanted to do criticism, I would be in New York or LA. But it's all
worked out for me for some reason.
What about your Chicago audience? Do more people read you out here than maybe
elsewhere?
I don't know. I have a feeling no. When I started out, it was very much I wanted to write
for the newspaper. I waited for the first issue of The Onion at the newsstands. But at some point I
stopped writing for print and started writing for a website. We were publishing print and web at
the same time, but it became very much like print is stale and the web is the head. The print
became the after thought, and that was one of the big transitions of my lifetime. I was literally
part of the crew that would paste up articles on paper to take them down and drive them to the
printing press in the middle of the night on Sunday. That was my entry into this business.
What was the turning point in writing for print versus writing for web? What was the
thought process in the change of gears?

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When I took over The A.V. Club at the end of 2004, we put up our content once a week,
and it was just the print content. We'd publish a new review each day, Tuesdays were for music,
Thursdays for movies, etc. It turned into updating it twice daily to four times daily, to the point
when I left, it's more or less where it is now where it's published all the time.
I kind of yearn for that period where there was this middle ground where you could
publish frequently but not incessantly and still be able to catch up. But having just one definitive
piece about something, that just doesn't do it anymore.
I subscribe to Time Magazine because I like to have access to the Time archives, which I
used when I was writing “The Laser Age” column. I would look up "aliens" for example. There
might be four articles about aliens in the summer of 1986, occasional mentions of James
Cameron later in there, but now it's "10 Greatest Science Fiction Films," "10 Greatest Aliens."
Those pieces can be really fun, but it just becomes repurposing the same blurbs over and over
again. So I'm not necessarily enchanted with the way things are, but I don't imagine them
changing any time soon.
What about as a writer back then? Was there a different style that you approached?
The advantages are length, which are great. When we started running longer pieces and
more personal pieces on The A.V. Club, people really responded to those in-depth articles with a
personal slant, and I feel like the Internet kind of wants that. It's good and bad. I feel that's crept
into how things are written about on the Internet. I always try to use a first person address as a
spice in the mix rather than the main dish itself. A lot of writers like to lead with themselves and
then get into the film later.
You say you're disenchanted with some of the things on the Internet. What would you say
is the state of film writing today?

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There's really great stuff out there, it's just finding stuff is difficult. Grantland was great
when that was around. The New York Times critics are great. There's some great stuff on
RogerEbert.com. And there's been a convergence between film and TV writing because TV is
where the heat is. I love TV, but I always want to root for the underdog. Movies are my first
love.
Is that a good or bad thing that those two are converging, film and TV?
I think it's fine by and large, but I feel like there are things that movies do that television
can't, and vice versa. When audiences get caught up in narrative and caught up in plot, our
response is often about style and themes. I think people are more open to recap culture where this
happened, this happened, but taking a step back and talking about themes, I see that less in
television writing, and I don't want that to seep into film writing.
What would you like to see more of in film writing?
I miss The Dissolve, to be honest.
If you really want an answer to that question, go back and look at the archives. I really
did try to put an idea of what we would want out there. Longer reviews with some context
around it. I always loved it when we had a great review on something from Scott [Tobias] and a
great analysis piece from Tasha [Robinson] and the coverage would get engaged.
Is there still a place for a specialty film website in this day and age?
I honestly don't know. Traffic is so key. You're more likely to find something in a general
interest area is more likely to be a sustainable model. And if you can fold a great specialty film
section into that, that's the best of both worlds. I think Vulture is a great example of that. They
have great critics, but they also get the traffic from a lot of quick hit items. And that's what I'm

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trying to do at Uproxx too, trying to get away with some more thoughtful pieces balanced out
with some quick awards nominations pieces or your Force Awakens response.
In an interview you did with Sam Adams at Criticwire after The Dissolve folded, you said
it's harder for you to foresee a bright future for younger critics. Has that answer changed
at all?
Not really, no.
After that I spent a while freelancing. I'm at a level where people won't offer me insulting
fees, but even with the not so insulting fees it's tough to scrape together a living.
Being on the other side of that suddenly, what was that like?
It's hard! Fortunately not too long after my unemployment ran out, I got the Uproxx job.
Pay is not great, and sometimes you don't get paid. Without naming names, there are some major
publications that owe me some money that I'm trying to track down before the end of the year.
It's tough.
It helped that I had a high profile shut down and I had people offering me things. I kind
of enjoyed being the High Plains Drifter of going over here and doing this and that. But it's just a
matter of getting paid. Pay is not great, and print is print. It's not in great shape these days.
My advice would be develop a relationship with editors who know you can do good
work, who know you can turn stuff in on time. The best combination of stuff I'm looking for is
fast, reliable, good and nice, by which I mean easy to work with. Most people aren't all those
qualities. But if you're not at least two of those things...
Just be reliable and be indispensable. Find editors who like your work and make them
want to work with you all the time. I think Charles Bramesco is a good example of someone who

185
is working a lot of places, and he is all of those things. So be all those things, and maybe you will
make some money.
If you're single and have low overhead, just starting out, you'll probably be fine. It's bad
when you have a mortgage, wife and kid and tuition, all these things; it's scary.
What is the job of the critic?
It depends on who you're writing for. A trade reviewer is going to have a different
responsibility than if you're writing for the Chicago Tribune. I want a sense of whether another
person liked it, but I want a sense of engagement, what are the issues, what did this film mean to
the person writing it, and what was the experience of watching the film? I'd rather read a critic I
disagreed with who could write about something eloquently and smartly than someone who just
said, “I liked it.”
What's your process when you write a review?
I take notes and then I don't use them. Mostly it's because I can't read what I've written.
But I feel note taking helps the process for some reason. I usually struggle over the lede and then
it goes from there. I don't necessarily have an outline of what I want to say going in, but a really
clean, coherent lede that I would find engaging as a reader kind of puts me on the path to what I
would want to write about anyway. Usually I write what comes to mind and then fill in the
blanks later.
Is it harder to write a pan, a praise or something in the middle?
Middling is harder than anything else. If I was dulled and uninspired by a film, it's much
harder. Pans of directors that you like are also really hard. I reviewed Joe Dante's Burying the Ex.
It is so awful, and I love Joe Dante, but he took the most bro-friendly, straight out of film school,

186
misogynistic script, tried to sprinkle a little Joe Dante on it and call it a movie. So awful. That's
rough, but it's also my least favorite film of this year.
Take me through how you started out.
I went to a small liberal arts school called Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio,
and I got into grad school in English at University of Wisconsin, Madison. And getting out of
Ohio was really good. I love Madison, it's like my spiritual home. I got my MA in English and
the idea was to get a Ph.D., but I didn't really care much for grad school at all. It was very '90s
theory.
But I ended up sticking around and ended up working at a place called Four Star Video
Heaven. I freelanced for The Onion and the very early days of The A.V. Club in '96. At a certain
point, Stephen Thompson, who was the editor at The A.V. Club at the time and now is at NPR,
brought me on full time as assistant editor. That was in '97. My first review was a film called Spy
Hard. It starred Leslie Nielsen in something of a Zucker/Abrahams spoof comedy but without
Zucker/Abrahams. Not really good at all. But I got paid $5 for the review and the ticket price
was $6.50, so a loss, but it worked out in the long run.
When Stephen left in 2004, I took over as editor, and I always tried to keep my skin in
the film reviewing game. That's what I love. I love editing and being the vision guy, but all
things being equal, I'd love to be a film critic for a daily newspaper.
I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, reading Terry Lawson and seeing Roger Ebert on TV, and I
thought these guys have the best job in the world. He just goes to movies and talks about them. I
never wanted to make movies or write movies, I just wanted to write and talk about movies, so I
wanted to find a way to keep doing that.

187
I was the film critic for my junior high newspaper and laid dormant for a long time up
through grad school. But I always liked writing for a popular audience. I don't really like
academic writing. It's invaluable and I don't want to slight it in anyway, but I like when that stuff
trickles down to the mainstream a little more to be honest. Finding an outlet where I could do
that was really great.
When you were starting out, what were some of the mistakes you made as a young writer,
and what are some of the mistakes people make today?
Being sort of snarky. I've come to really detest snark, but it came so easy. I remember
making fun of Peter Gallagher's eyebrows in a review. He's a great actor! Why make fun of his
eyebrows? That's just a very superficial thing to say.
I do see that sometimes, missing the big picture to get bogged down in one detail. That
happens with younger writers and older films not appreciating the style and the era that it was
made. I had to grow up a little to get there too. I was resistant to Westerns and musicals for a
while, but now I love Westerns and musicals, but I wasn't exposed to it as much growing up.
That's why I'm trying to show my daughter old animation. She's growing up watching black and
white Mickey Mouse cartoons when she was too young to think it was strange. Now hopefully I
can continue that, but I don't want to impose tastes on her either.
What gives you satisfaction in writing reviews?
I like the experience of sitting and watching it and testing my engagement of it. I wish I
had more time to write for pleasure or that I had a blog. At the end of the day, it's the end of the
day. I'm not going to sit around at my laptop and plug away in the hour and a half I have to spend
with my kids. But trying to find ways to get paid for things you would ideally do for pleasure? I
love writing about movies.

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Keith Phipps Takeaways – Put Things Into Context
Reviews in The Dissolve and Pitchfork are loaded with historical context, background on
previous work and details regarding the surrounding culture and reaction that have indirectly
shaped the text. The context behind a film places it in the generation to which it belongs. It helps
show you what this film means in the here and now. No publication did this with the quality and
consistency of The Dissolve.
Keith Phipps says he’s always written for a general readership. You want to minimize
plot description in your writing, but as both Kenneth Turan and Claudia Puig have echoed, to a
degree, people really want to know about this stuff.
“I think in order of importance, (1) what is this film, (2) what happens in it, and (3) is it
any good? For a general readership, that's what you need to do,” Phipps said. “The beauty of it is
to bring in other context and analysis as much as you can. What has this director done before?
How does this fit into the context of his or her work?”
The Dissolve’s readership was a younger base of passionate film goers, but not
necessarily experts in the way you might expect readers of Film Comment to be. Even if they do
know the background details, Phipps says reviews “could use a little more table setting and a
little less assumptions.” It’s not dumbing down, but showing how we got here.
“One of the things young critics do is to not put in context and background,” Phipps said.
“I was complaining with a fellow writer of a trend of younger writers to trumpet, ‘I don't know
that much. This is all new to me.’ Well why do I want to read you in that case?”
I shared with Phipps reviews of Chi-Raq and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force
Awakens. In each case, Phipps was looking for proof that I knew my audience. My Star Wars
review was published on my blog, so my lede was an anecdote. He didn’t suggest to lose it, but
to reserve something so personal for later in the review, similarly to how Turan recommended I

189
avoid leading off with so much detail so early. Phipps says he tends to do the most work on the
beginning and end of pieces, and I feel part of a good editor’s job is to make sure the article is
useful, engaging and lasting to as wide a swath of readers as possible. This meant watching out
for superlatives, remembering to be accurate with details and going beyond saying what a movie
does to discussing whether it actually works. I talked about J.J. Abrams’s glossy, highly CGI
approach to The Force Awakens, but left out the pros and cons, not unlike how Peter Rainer
wanted more from my Trumbo review.
I was glad for Phipps to have looked at the nuts and bolts of my reviews, but his advice
on how to get writing gigs and how to get editors to notice was far more practical. Be fast, be
reliable, be good, and be easy to work with.
“Most people aren't all those qualities. But if you're not at least two of those things…just
be reliable and be indispensable. Find editors who like your work and make them want to work
with you all the time,” Phipps said.

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Chi-Raq – As Edited by Keith Phipps
No movie this year is as bold-faced opinionated and timely of a political statement as
Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.
1
That’s because movies are rarely this topical, this aggressive or this
urgent. The film is littered with names of African Americans
2
the media has been shouting for
months, it has numerous hashtag ready catch phrases, it stops the film for a sermon that is
essentially a vicious op-ed, and it declares up front that “This is an EMERGENCY” in giant,
flashing red letters.
And yet Lee’s film, easily his best in over a decade, is captivating and harrowing because
it is so entertaining. Chi-Raq’s message of peace and love lingers in the memory because it’s told
in rhyming verse, because it has glamorous musical numbers and because the dialogue has more
words for sex than you can count. The film’s humor, color and energy don’t make light of a bad
situation; it helps make the movie sing and sting.
Lee draws his source material from the Ancient Greek play by Aristophanes Lysistrata, in
which women of the Spartan warriors
3
refuse sex for their husbands until they put an end to the
war and bloodshed. In modern day Chicago, homicides from gang related violence have killed
more since 9/11 than the casualties of Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq. Lee uses the South Side
and two rival gangs, the Spartans and Trojans, as a backdrop for how the women of Chi-Raq
stage a sex strike (“No Peace, No Pussy”, they declare) to end the killings.
But drawing from Lysistrata isn’t just a happy accident or a cute framing mechanism to
introduce sex into the story. Women in this film become the catalyst for change, and Lee’s use of

1
Maybe smooth this out a bit. I get what you’re saying but I trip over the adjectives.
2
Specifically African-American victims of violence, right? Good to specify.
3
Not just Spartans. Starts as Athenian women then spreads to Sparta. Either way, you should
clarify and get it right.

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this play reframes the conversation on gun violence to include gender and sexuality. The film
barks that people are dying everyday, “and you want to talk about how women behave?”
Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is the girlfriend to the rising rapper and Spartan gang-leader
Chi-raq (Nick Cannon), and after a local mother (Jennifer Hudson) begins searching for the killer
of her young daughter, Lysistrata stumbles across a successful sex strike in Africa
1
and rallies
Spartan and Trojan women to organize and do the same. She leads everyone in a pledge, and
they use their sexuality as a weapon, but without killing anyone. In a hilarious and outrageous
move they capture a local armory and both force peace talks and rally women around the country
and world.
Lee’s politics are relevant on a national stage, but Chi-Raq is effective in part because it
is localized to these Chicago neighborhoods. The film is highly specific and captures a stark
reality that people familiar with watching WGN 9 news will be all too familiar with. Lee even
gets inside the culture and color of both this Greek chorus and community. Lysistrata’s outfits
alone are worth putting down your guns for, starting in a tight purple cami and ragged cut-off
jean shorts before transforming into sexy camo fatigues to show that this really is war.
Samuel L. Jackson is the film’s eloquent and well-versed narrator Dolmedes. His ass was
on the first Wheaties box, as he puts it, and Lee sets the tone beautifully by opening the film by
freeze-framing it. Dolmedes stands on a stage and halts the chanting crowd behind him in order
to explain the film’s Greek tragedy
2
origins and their intention to rhyme everything. One more
stat about homicides is like white noise at this point, but when Lysistrata says the men in this city
just live by the “bang-bang”, you remember it.
3

1
On the Internet at the urging of Angela Bassett. Good point to clarify.
2
Not tragedy, comedy
3
Great point

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Chi-Raq has some incredible set pieces. In one a man wearing Confederate Flag
underpants rides a big black cannon and figuratively makes love to his gun. And to end the film
Lysistrata and Chi-Raq partake in a sexual showdown broadcast live. But the one that sums up
the film best is a sermon given by one of the film’s few white characters, Father Mike Corridan
(Chicago local John Cusack). Less a sermon and more a fiery op-ed and call to action, Father
Corridan screams repeatedly that “You will not murder our children” and that what’s happening
in this city is “self-inflicted genocide.” His words stop the film’s plot in its tracks and boldly
assert all of Lee’s politics. It’s bloody, it’s messy, but damn if it’s emotional and devastating.
Chi-Raq is as rebellious and invigorating as Lee’s Do the Right Thing was in 1989, and
as scarily relevant and poignant as 25
th
Hour was in 2002’s Post 9/11 New York. But this time
he’s taken root in my city, and this truly is an emergency.

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Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens – As Edited by Keith Phipps
I was 9 years old when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, and
despite all the bile hurled at the prequels, at that age I had no concept of good. All I knew was
that there was more. More Star Wars was a good thing, and for the Millennials like me who give
the prequels the most hatred, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the first Star Wars
movie we’ve been able to see for the first time as adults.
1

The Force Awakens doesn’t need to be as great as A New Hope or The Empire Strikes
Back for it to live up to expectations. It needs to be able to fit snugly into the Star Wars canon in
a way the prequels never seemed to belong. J.J. Abrams has delivered less than a masterpiece,
but The Force Awakens is a Star Wars movie.
The Force Awakens has the spectacle, the whimsy, the humor, the campy, screwball
charm, the romance and the invigorating excitement of the original three films. In channeling the
same themes of good and evil and the mythos of the Force, this film has the spirit of a Star Wars
classic.
2

In part, it’s because J.J. Abrams has nearly remade Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
In between films, a new evil entity known as The First Order has risen to power. Luke
Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has vanished, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is the dark lord out to find
him and put an end to the rise of the Jedi. A Resistance pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac)
hides a map to Luke’s location in a droid called BB-8 and sends it off on a desert planet.
3
The
person who finds it is another scavenger, a person without a family and with dreams of becoming

1
My first thought here is, Who is your audience? It’s a lot about you with some references to
others of your generation. It’s a risky gambit opening so specifically on the personal and then
going on to talk about the film from a specific generational POV. Would this info be better saved
for later in the review? Is there a stronger, more universal way to open?
2
Good.
3
Maybe clarify that this is the opening of the film.

194
a pilot and getting out of this desolate place. Starting to sound familiar? The only difference
1
is
that this young person is a woman, Rey (newcomer Daisy Ridley). Along the way a
Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) will break off from The First Order and even stage a
daring, hapless rescue of Poe before meeting Rey, working to protect her and banish his own past
demons.
Though A New Hope is proud to boast themes of good and evil in the biggest and
broadest of space opera, it is a film about growth, finding identity and believing in yourself.
Luke makes that spiritual journey and sheds his youthful naiveté, and Rey will go on that same
journey, answering the call to believe in the Force and embrace her destiny.
This is what Star Wars is about, and in that spirit Abrams more than delivers. As with the
best of the franchise, the film dances between different moments of action on the ground and in
the air. There are thrilling lightsaber duels, stunning dogfights, goofy chases and escapes from an
amorphous tentacled creature, a scene inside a seedy cantina full of quirky galactic beings, and
even something of a new Death Star. Despite the high CGI gloss, Abrams has captured the tempo
of these pictures as much as the tone, with cathartic, cheerful action set pieces that avoid chaos
and over-stylization in a way that’s classical and tangible.
2

John Boyega has a lot of uncontained enthusiasm as Finn, Adam Driver has a lot of
angsty rage as Kylo Ren, and Daisy Ridley has a lot of scruffy, rugged charm and star power.
Yet all three are led by the master, back in character as though he never left: Harrison Ford as

1
More main difference than only difference. She’s without family or connections. Luke was a
farm kid with friends and adoptive parents.
2
It seems like here would be a good place to discuss the pros and cons of this approach. You’ve
set up what Abrams does. Does it work?

195
Han Solo. Han is one of the great pop culture characters of all time,
1
and he continues to get the
best lines, and Chewbacca the best reaction shots. Ford is acting from the seat of his pants,
sarcastic and cool yet always in a hurry and thinking on the fly. Finn has brought Han to the new
Death Star and reveals he has no plan for taking down its shields, but maybe they can use the
Force. “That’s not how the Force works,” Han bellows in his trademark exasperation. This could
be Ford’s best performance in nearly two decades.
The Force Awakens does at times feel like a reboot, but hearing John Williams’s magical
score swell in all the right places reminds us that there’s no harm in not reinventing the wheel.
And the film does take one massive risk that will surely be polarizing. But regardless of if the
plot has holes or if the twists hold up, this is still Star Wars. More is good.
2

1
I try to avoid this kind of superlative and get to it another way. It’s so common that greatest
claims start to lose all meaning.
2
OK, you tied it back. Still not sure that’s the strongest way to open, though.

196
Conclusion
I opened this book with an attempt to serve “Ben,” a young critic looking to get a
foothold in the industry and improve his or her writing. Yet the ideas shared by these eight critics
aren’t exclusive to amateurs. All over the web critics are writing about film, music, books, TV,
food, dance, fine art and more. Certainly not all of that criticism is by any means good, and even
for those reviews that are, not one of those critics is immune to or above the advice and
philosophies articulated in this book.
Good critics read constantly, and they know the mechanics of writing a meaningful,
engaging review. But even among the eight critics here, not all of them know each other’s
secrets. Do they get the chance to talk shop in this way, to see how their colleagues work?
A critic like Michael Phillips wants to do the necessary research to know what he might
see as he walks into a movie, whereas many others want to know as little as possible. Manohla
Dargis may not be a fan of how the Internet has given some writers license to endlessly spew,
but Keith Phipps realizes that plenty of readers have responded strongly to the long-form,
personal writing made possible by the web. To Kenneth Turan there’s little distinction between
“reviewing” and “criticism,” yet Peter Labuza feels that the “reviewing” mastered by critics like
Roger Ebert is a valuable service apart from more in-depth critical and academic writing.
Labuza and Turan may be good examples of two critics who are as far apart on the
spectrum of criticism as you can get. Your own style may fall somewhere in between the two
poles on that spectrum. But the eight critics here have more in common than what sets them
apart. Their shared themes are what make good criticism good. These ideas are as true if you’re
just starting out or have been writing for 30 years. We’re all “Ben.”
Criticism is a Conversation

197
Dargis said, “I see criticism as expanding upon a conversation about art. I think you need
criticism with art. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum.”
Criticism is a conversation between you and your reader. By taking a text and crafting a
personal response, you enhance the reader’s own experience of witnessing that work of art. Peter
Rainer said if your writing is inspiring to the reader, he or she can discover that film more deeply
than on his or her own. “If you agree with a critic, that’s neither here nor there.”
The hard part is in knowing your audience. We all want to express ourselves, and with
the advent of social media we all can. We can be as loud as we work to be. Keith Uhlich said the
smartest of us know not to shout our opinions over Twitter. “We’re the quiet people.”
But we still need to take the time and hone our ideas. “Writing is thinking,” Dargis said.
We’re writing for the reader to engage, and Labuza feels that if we write seriously, our readers
will engage seriously. Cinephilia, he says, is about adding to the conversation around film,
whether that’s through your writing, what you’re sharing or the art you make in return. This
conversation doesn’t happen without criticism, and to echo Phillips, it’s a privilege to be in the
role of the thought leader.
“It’s a great privilege to be able to work out a completely personal response to somebody
else’s work in such a way that might be valuable to people other than yourself,” Phillips said. “If
you can take the time, effort and care to do that job well, you’re not just working it out for
yourself, you’re actually a use to others.”
Find What’s Interesting to You
Writing is made to be read, Uhlich says, and though we write for an audience, there’s a
balance between the selfless and the selfish. We reveal ourselves in conversation to others by

198
tapping into what resonates with us most deeply. “It’s about identifying the entry point that most
spoke to you,” Uhlich said. “How did you get into this particular labyrinth?”
Dargis believes that only if you find an intelligent entry point into a film will you allow
your reader to do the same. Phillips said that if you don’t maintain your intellectual honesty,
you’ll never be able to capture the essence of every film you come across. And Uhlich feels that
there is no such thing as consensus. Find someone you agree with, dig down deep enough, and
you’ll manage to find a difference that sets you apart.
When I started writing, it was hard to know what I felt. I was more interested in what
everyone else had to say. The more I read, the more I learned, and the more I watched movies,
the more ideas I had of my own. What was even harder though was trusting those instincts to put
them down on paper. You can’t be afraid and you can’t hesitate. Why should your readers be
true to you if you aren’t true to yourself?
Everything in Life is More Interesting than a Plot Summary
I asked every critic in this book the practical, nuts and bolts question, “What often gets
left out of good criticism?” The answer was never really anything new, but it veered from talking
about the performances, to dealing with the zeitgeist, to analyzing the visual technique of what
gives movies meaning.
But to reiterate Phillips’s point of view, “Everything in life is more interesting than a plot
summary. There’s no reason you should devote an undue amount of whatever space you have to
just hack through a narrative rehash. There’s just no point.”
Maybe if I heard that enough times I would finally remember it and stop putting so damn
much of it into my reviews.

199
It’s common sense, but it’s hard. It’s hard to write about something that isn’t obvious. It’s
hard to really explain how something works. And it’s even harder to explain why any of that
actually matters or what it makes you feel.
Labuza says by avoiding the stuff of adjectives, it forces you to talk about what a director
or a performer actually does on screen. If you can describe clearly enough what’s happening, you
don’t need to say something is “amazing.” Phipps says you can feel cheated as a reader if you
don’t give a sense of what a film actually looks or feels like, and that our inclination through
television writing has forced us into a “recap culture.” And because anyone can find this
information easily online, Dargis says it’s “incumbent on arts writers to be more interesting than
that.”
Whether film, TV, music, books or anything else, even great writing often fails to engage
with the elements that make these artistic mediums distinct from one another. It behooves us as
writers to tap into those qualities with new words and phrases that go beyond the jargon and the
technical terminology to help audiences reach a new understanding and appreciation of a work of
art.
Movies are Feelings
Phillips said that critics who don’t engage with things beyond the plot often don’t get past
describing movies in terms of love, hate or apathy. They write solely about how they feel and
neglect context, technique and the surrounding culture. “These critics tend to be the ones who
never write a mixed review with a gun to their head,” he said. “But the movies are all about pure
feeling. You have to respond accordingly.”
Critics are people too, and because we have emotions like anyone else, and because we
care about the movies more deeply than most, we’re the most overjoyed to champion a film that

200
spoke to us, most furious when savaging one that insulted us, and most devastated to see a movie
that doesn’t move us at all. “The mediocre shit saps your soul,” Uhlich said.
So how do we make those emotions work for us? Claudia Puig says we need to find new
ways to say something is great, and that we have a whole list of reasons to say why something is
awful. Dargis says movies can be “emotionally overwhelming,” and by working through our
emotions we can approach the object itself. She adds that perhaps our immediate outburst is not
the most interesting thing there is to say about a film. Movies have such a power to ensnare us
that we need a moment to step away and process how we really feel. This is so important
because in many ways the movies are bigger than our feelings.
“We have to examine. Not looking at culture, not looking at what it says about us, not
looking at what it’s doing, not looking at what it does well,” Phipps asks. “Whether it’s Star
Wars or Son of Saul, these are movies that say something about who we are and how we see the
world. These things stick around.”
Rise to the Occasion
If movies are feelings, then communicating those feelings through writing must be some
kind of release.
Rainer said the hardest reviews to write are for the truly great films. There’s pressure to
live up to the excitement. “The real challenge is to rise to the occasion and try to do justice to
what you’re seeing on screen. On the rare occasions when you think you’ve done that, it’s a
transcendent feeling, and I think it keeps me and a lot critics going.”
A transcendent feeling. Is it strange that someone sitting at a keyboard can experience a
sensation on par with the sense of accomplishment felt by a performer, a builder or a religious

201
figure? As critics, we’re channeling big emotions and ideas about things for which we feel
passionately. I don’t think it’s strange at all.
Uhlich believed you want to make a movie live on the page, and he believes there’s a
connection between the creative urge and even a sexual one. “The satisfaction is when I’ve
finished a piece, it’s the best kind of high. Doing a good job creatively, it’s a high like no other.
Drugs cannot approximate it; sex maybe approximates it, except orgasms only last one and a half
seconds, and the euphoria from a well written piece is all the more wonderful.”
Turan’s reasoning behind rising to the occasion of a great film is far more practical: we
want the people reading our reviews to actually go see the movie. We can wax poetic about how
much a film moved us, but will it be enough to get someone out of the house, find a babysitter,
drive 45 minutes in traffic, pay for parking and admission? That’s not easy, but our words have
the power to do that, and it feels great when someone tells you they’re glad they actually took the
time. Knowing you made a small difference in a person’s day, maybe even their life? That’s its
own kind of release.
Get the Bad Pieces Behind You
When I was in jazz band in high school, we’d attend competitions and clinics given by
professionals. At every one, they’d say, “Do you guys listen to jazz? You should listen to more
jazz.” Put another way, you need to keep working, learning and listening if you want to find your
voice. You can’t develop it in an afternoon.
For all those moments of elation and accomplishment, there are the pieces that years,
months or even days removed feel humiliating. How could I have ever written such a piece of
junk? Uhlich said outright, “I hate everything that I write after I’m done with it. It’s all crap.”

202
If you’re having those moments, it probably means you’re growing. It’s a good thing,
because you need to get those bad pieces behind you. When Phillips said he needed to get those
first 100 reviews out of his system, which he found “inept or overreaching or ridiculously
snarky,” I wondered if he meant to say his first 1000.
But it is a relief to know that every critic goes through this cycle. Labuza had editors who
rejected his work yet helped him improve, and he looks back at those pieces and says “you pull
out your hair” as a result. Rainer called his early college reviews “cringe-worthy.” Phipps says
snarkiness came far too easy in his early writing, and he wonders why he ever felt it necessary to
make fun of Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows.
“My advice would be to do it as much as you possibly can, even if you’re doing it for
yourself or for a very small audience,” Puig said. “Wherever it is you can find an outlet to do it, I
think you need to use that muscle. Going to movies is an easy thing, it’s just coming back and
writing about it.”
Check Your Privilege
“Male. Mostly white. Very pasty.” That’s what Labuza said is the traditional image of a
cinephile. That person, he says, is coming out of the basement and beginning to engage with the
world, and that person is even becoming more diverse, but perhaps not quickly enough.
I can’t ignore any longer that I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m straight. And out of eight
critics in this book, six are white men, two are women, one is gay, and one is a person of color.
Earlier in this book I quoted a study that showed in 2013 only 22 percent of Rotten
Tomatoes’ Top Critics were female (Lauzen 2013), and even less research has been done to
analyze race. Although any savvy reader of film criticism will be able to point to numerous
names of diverse critics and note their absence within these pages. Those who were interviewed

203
went out of their way to mention Wesley Morris, Dana Stevens, Mark Harris, Justin Chang, and
Lisa Schwarzbaum, just to name a few, and for the record, and I’d love to speak with all of them.
But more inclusion on my part doesn’t negate the fact that there are still problems in the industry
at large.
“I don’t know if enough people have looked at race, but it’s overwhelmingly white male.
When I used to belong to the LA Film Critics, it was just weird to be in that room. All these
dudes, it was just a weird thing,” Dargis said. “It’s changing, but change comes slowly.”
I became more aware than ever throughout this process of the lens through which I look
at films, the lens through which I write and how that point of view differs from and even neglects
a great many people.
Yet sometimes I hear that I couldn’t possibly understand what it is to write from a
different perspective. Movie critics are all about different perspectives. We watch countless films
of all genres from all cultures and all leanings, and through our writing we’re primed more than
anyone to call further attention to the lack of parity on our screens and in our bylines. I can’t
write as a woman, but I can bring the collective experience I’ve gleaned from others, champion
their exposure and give my readers a better understanding of the world around them.
Have the Compulsion
“Do you have that compulsion?” Uhlich says if you want to be a writer, and the answer to
that question is yes, “then it’s not for me to say don’t do it because you will figure out a way to
do it no matter what.”
“Don’t let the site justify why you should write for them,” Labuza said. “Justify to
yourself why you’re doing it, and if you can’t and are wishy-washy, there’s another site where
you can do it because the world is so big.”

204
“You have to understand what made you want to do this in the first place, and hold on to
it like crazy, because there will be a million and one reasons and discouragements to move away
from it,” Rainer said.
“If you realize that you are not a genius, and I am not a genius, then you have to work
harder than everybody else,” Dargis said.
“I don't say don't do it. I say give it your all. But be prepared to do other things,” Puig
said. “Diversify yourself as much as you can. If you want to be a film critic, don't just think
online or publications. Think about radio or whatever kind of medium is out there.”
If you’ve read this far, I believe you do have the compulsion. I don’t need to tell you the
outlook of film criticism as a profession is bad. I don’t need to say that there’s a lot of bad
writing out there that will get noticed ahead of yours. None of the critics interviewed here
represent the perfect outline for success or have the hard and fast rules to becoming a great writer
and landing a career. All I can hope is that you build on the ideas presented here in order to find
your own voice. Don’t let me stop you.

205
Bibliography

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of Film Criticism,” Criticwire, July 9, 2015, http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/editors-
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20150709?utm_campaign=Indiewire&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_c
ontent=1436469269

Betancourt, Manuel, “Where Are the Latino Film Critics and Why Do They Matter?” Remezcla,
January 21, 2016, http://remezcla.com/features/film/where-are-the-latino-film-critics/

Bordwell, David, “Film criticism: Always declining, never quite falling,” Observations on Film
Art, March 16, 2010, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/03/16/film-criticism-
always-declining-never-quite-falling/

Cameron, James, “He’s Mad as Hell at Turan,” The Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1998,
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/mar/28/entertainment/ca-33428.

Dargis, Manohla, and Scott, A.O., “Hooray for Hollywood! (No, Really.),” The New York Times,
September 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/arts/hollywood-retooling-
subjects-broaden-but-studio-films-remain-essential.html.

Dargis, Manohla, “As Indies Explode, an Appeal for Sanity,” The New York Times, January 9,
2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/movies/flooding-theaters-isnt-good-for-
filmmakers-or-filmgoers.html?_r=0.

Dargis, Manohla, in discussion with the author, November 6, 2015.

Jones, Kent, “Intolerance,” Film Comment, May/June 2013, Accessed December 2015,
http://www.filmcomment.com/article/intolerance-quentin-tarantino-john-ford/

Labuza, Peter, in discussion with the author, October 27, 2015.

Labuza, Peter, “Magic Mike XXL,” Letterboxd, June 29, 2015.
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Lauzen, Martha, M, Ph.D., “Gender @ The Movies: Online Film Critics and Criticism,” Center
for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, San Diego,
CA, 2013,
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206
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Tribune, December 17, 2015, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/sc-
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis is a compilation of interviews with eight working film critics, presented in consecutive order: Michael Phillips, Keith Uhlich, Peter Labuza, Peter Rainer, Manohla Dargis, Kenneth Turan, Claudia Puig and Keith Phipps. In a series of articles, transcribed Q&A’s and annotated movie reviews, I offer a collection of takeaways by which young, aspiring film critics can learn to improve and find their way in the industry of film criticism. Each interview explores the film critic’s craft, philosophy, advice for younger critics, and outlook on both the professional discipline of criticism and of the film industry more broadly. The reviews are written by myself, but are annotated utilizing direct feedback from each of the critics interviewed. They are intended as an example of the working critic’s ideas and advice in practice and a window into the reviewing and editing thought process in 2016.

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Creator Welk, Brian G. (author)

Core Title The critic's guidebook: conversations, advice and models for young, aspiring film critics

School Annenberg School for Communication

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Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 04/16/2017

Defense Date 04/15/2016

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