The Truth About Reviews

Reflections on the value of movie criticism in general and their necessity to newspapers in particular could fill volumes, and do. The answer to the question “Why run film reviews?” is short, however.

It’s a sad truth that there is little good film writing these days. Staff movie reviewers have been dismissed from their posts across the nation, and those who remain are granted less and less space. The Internet seems ruled by a lynch mob mentality, as shown in the online pileup that purported to be rational comment on the second season of True Detective. Online writers mostly aren’t edited and these sloppy first drafts can make hasty writers seem crazy, like the Hollywood-based blogger for an Oscar prediction website who dismisses actresses if they are deemed fat and chastises actors for having sideburns of the wrong length.

One cannot read this cloacal onrush of bad prose, vacant of ideas, without eventually feeling physically ill. The nausea, even anger, increases at the memory of the great popular press movie reviewers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, such as the late Andrew Sarris, the late Raymond Durgnat, the late Dwight Macdonald [SIC], the late Robin Wood, the recently late Richard Corliss of Time, the still living but marginalized John Simon, the missing-in-action William Pechter, Renata Adler (who abandoned movie reviewing after little more than a year), the inactive Molly Haskell, and for all her quirks and hobby horses maybe even Pauline Kael.

In modern times, Dave Kehr, who wrote an excellent video column for the Times quit, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice was fired, and Jonathan Rosenbaum retired from the Chicago Reader.

What distinguished these people at their prime was welcoming berths at intelligent publications that gave them a lot of literary real estate to explore ideas, theories, and history. Sarris’ review of the sentimental baseball movie Bang the Drum Slowly is typical. It includes references to the commercial viability of sports movies, marital discord, why men prefer TV, the “pornography of sentimentality,” Holden Caufield, Jean Cocteau, the Keystone Cops, Ty Cobb, The Best Years of Our Lives, Odd Man Out, gambling, women’s lib, Pride of the Yankees, and basketball. In today’s climate of compression, lunch-hour attention spans, and institutional non-support, Sarris would be lucky to mention the plot and his opinion.

But look what today’s readers would miss! An engaged mind using the film as a platform to discuss the affairs of the day, film history, and the lived insights of a lifetime. The best reviews are really editorials. You want the writer to be biased. That’s when the agitation of the shell leads to the pearl. Thus, the short answer is that the best movie reviews are about more than just the film under discussion. To write about movies means to write about congress, mountain climbing, opera, sex, the Gold Standard, beauty, the designated hitter, drug cartels, American history, and David Foster Wallace, among a thousand other topics — or as (the late) Roger Ebert put it, life itself.

Movie reviews are necessary to newspapers because art and entertainment are crucial to society. In film, you find politics, sociology, aesthetics, and whatever it means to be alive right now. Movies are often less than they could be, but they are more than the length of an anachronistic haircut.