My Approach to Film Reviewing
Turning an Interest into a Hobby
Introduction
I’ve been an avid Letterboxd user for some time now (probably close to or just over five years) and how I’ve approached film reviewing and rating has changed a lot since I started. This makes sense and I hope that my changes reflect some measure of growth and deeper understanding of the medium. I remember seeing a good post a while ago that said if you look back at your past activities and don’t find them cringe on at least some level then you probably haven't grown. This is how my older reviews strike me, either they’re curt but accurate or contain wrong and surface-level commentary. For a while now I’ve focused on making my reviews much longer, at first this was a real task but now it’s gotten much easier where I can write three or four paragraphs as a reflex.
I’m sure to my friends my commitment is annoying at times since how much does Son of the Pink Panther (1993) deserve to have written about it? Apparently at least over 300 words. I write these at-times verbose diatribes in part to reflect on my personal experience with the movie but also as some sort of justification or explanation behind my star rating.
Scoring
There are a lot of fun meta-commentaries I’ve been a part of and have read online about what the best numbered rating system is. I’ve seen some people say it should be out of ten (which is the most common), or maybe out of five (like Letterboxd does), or that there should be no rating system at all and the reviewer should rely on just their written word or a simple recommend/don’t recommend system. There’s merit to all of these and I do think that whatever system you choose, there should be some elaboration on your “score” that accompanies it.
What I will reject outright is any system that relies on an out of 100 scale (like what Metacritic does, though in their case since they’re an aggregator it makes a bit more sense); this is a bit too large to be helpful and should just be reserved for school exams. My personal favorite is actually the Letterboxd out-of-five system, however, it is distinct from the Goodreads out-of-five system because the former includes half scores which I think is critical for adding just that extra bit of nuance.1
Some people seek to define what each of their full stars or half stars mean, from 1/5 to 2.5/5 to 4.5/5, but I actually think that makes the whole thing a bit too clinical and depersonalized. In my view it is a strength of the system that a 3.5/5 will mean different things to different people, it encourages you to become more familiar with a specific person’s opinions and attitudes. If you want something more objective (if there really is such a thing when it comes to art, there is) then it’s easy enough to rely on averages and composite scores, which Letterboxd does offer on the movie’s main page. When you come to decide on your score, what you actually give the movie is just as much about how you personally vibe with it as it is about its technical successes.
This actually leads to a 3/5 meaning different things to the same person at different times and for different reasons; for example, I gave both The Benchwarmers (2006) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) a 3/5 but the score means different things because of my personal relationships with these two movies. However, I think it is important for the score to stay consistent regarding your level of enjoyment of the movie and I think in this case I did enjoy these two movies to roughly the same degree but for different reasons. I also watched these movies three years apart, so it’s also possible that what I reasonably considered to be a 3/5 has changed. Again, I think the fact that there is so much variation possible regarding these scores makes the system more robust rather than weaker and at the same time it encourages a deeper exploration.
Review Writing
This deeper exploration is where I think the written reviews serve a helpful purpose. As mentioned above, my earliest reviews are amateurish but I wasn’t exactly looking to be the next Roger Ebert at the time. I’m actually not looking to be the next Roger Ebert now either even if I am treating the process with more rigor; I’m just trying to put my honest thoughts down and at least once in a while say something insightful.
I’m writing these reviews mainly for myself, I think first of all that it’s just fun to reflect on culture and I try to be more active in my interests and therefore turn them into productive hobbies. At the same time it’s caused me to care more about film and watch loads more movies that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen; the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop. I’ve been fortunate that I also have friends that like to write movie reviews and enjoy reading what I write; their ‘likes’ on my reviews are not why I write them but it is nice encouragement.
My reviews usually consist of commentary on the technical features of the movie itself, including the performances of the cast, the quality of the characters and story, and my own personal relationship with it. I think there are objective measures of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art but there is no way to interact with art objectively. How much you enjoy a movie and how much deference or benefit of the doubt you will give or withhold from it will rely, to some degree, on how much you positively connect with it. This is typically where someone’s ‘bias’ will come in and it is up to the respectable reviewer to acknowledge this attitude and either remove it from the review entirely or cordon it off. I favor the latter over the former because I think it is important to express to the reader and to yourself how the movie impacted or offended you.
I took a few film/media classes while attending Florida State University including a course on German Cinema which was probably the impetus though not the catalyst for when I would begin to approach films more critically. I had an actual German immigrant as my teacher, Mr. Weber, and he was a cool enough guy even if he was a typical European liberal. We went through the eras of German film from the silents, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), to the first prominent talkies, M (1931), to the Nazis, Triumph of the Will (1935), to the Cold War and the modern era, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). We spent loads of time going over the technical evolutions present in each of these movies but I always enjoyed the discussions we had about their places in the culture more. What about each of these movies did they reflect back about the society that created them and what someone watching them 80, 50, or 20 years in the future could learn.
We had a great textbook for this class that was like no other textbook I had owned before, primarily because it was actually fun to read. The style was much more conversational, like the author was enthusiastically explaining to the reader what was cool or memorable about each of these movies rather than doing a series of terse breakdowns. Although he was dead by this point, I also began reading some of the older reviews by Roger Ebert around the same time and that was like another revelation. I appreciated the pedalisting Ebert did of the movies he liked and the dismantling of the movies he disliked, there was something honest about this approach. Ebert was also just a brilliant writer and really dug to the core of what these films were trying to say; the best example of this and my favorite of his is the one he did for Lost in Translation (2003) by Sofia Coppola. It is from these two sources, of course along with a myriad of influences that I can’t directly identify, where I think my style and approach arise.
Supportive Classifications
You might have noticed above that I’ve used ‘film’ and ‘movie’ interchangeably, that was on purpose. This is not to say that these are the same, because they aren’t, but to say that I recognize both from what I watch. These two, along with a third title of ‘cinema,’ are the three classifications that I give each picture when reviewing them on Letterboxd. I’m not sure when I started this process but it’s been a wonderful way to add a third dimension to my movie logging, beyond just the two dimensions of the numbered rating and the written review. I used to have a quick breakdown of the three classifications in the bio of my Letterboxd account but removed it a while ago, probably for some dumb reason.
The three classifications of movie, film, and cinema exist as a sort of pyramid structure of one above the other in shrinking sets of population size but this does not necessarily reflect superiority of one above the other. Now, generally a film will be better than a movie and cinema will be better than a film but this is not always the case and there are plenty of examples when I enjoy a movie more than a film or a film more than cinema. These classifications are more so meant to reflect when a particular movie does something specific that elevates it from one stratum to the next.
Movie: Basic tier, meant to capture the vast majority of what is released. This will include releases that are utterly garbage to ones that actually are quite good, but fail to really excel in one thing or another.
Examples: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Bottoms (2023)
Film: Middle tier, meant to capture a smaller segment but still a sizable portion of what is released. This is reserved for releases that are good but really provide something special in one or two but not all of the critical aspects of a successful picture, whether that be the cast, or the performances, or the writing, or the cinematography, or the score, or the direction.
Examples: Spider-Man (2002), Sideways (2004), The Social Network (2010)
Cinema: Highest tier, meant to capture a very small retinue of exceptional releases. This will only include those pictures that really excel in each or at least most of the critical aspects of a successful picture (mentioned in the Film classification) and provide an memorable viewing experience.
Examples: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Barry Lyndon (1975), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Now, much like the numbered ratings, these classifications can be a bit fluid and most likely where a release falls into one of them can shift over time and as I revisit it. Even just looking for some examples from my Letterboxd account I see that I had placed some previously in a lower tier before raising them on a second watch. Obviously, there’s a certain amount of shock whenever you are watching a movie for the first time and most likely you’ll miss a lot of its subtleties until the second or third rewatch. The same principle holds true for books and albums as well, which I think is exciting and it encourages discussion with other fans about what you might have missed.2
I’ve also played around with the idea of adding two extra classifications, either to go below ‘movie’ or as standalone and separate tags. These would be ‘schlock’ and ‘slop,’ which were partly inspired by the guys over at Red Letter Media and how they sometimes relish in bad movies. I don’t have working definitions for these two classifications but a good way to think about them is that the best Fast & Furious movies are schlock and the worst ones are slop. There is something charming about schlock that is totally absent in slop, that at least someone behind the scenes was earnest in their attempt to make a good movie rather than just going in for a full cash grab. This does not map completely onto the “it’s so bad it’s good” paradigm that has become popular, but I guess they are related to a degree.
Reflections
The most important thing to remember from all of this is that the way you approach one movie specifically and movies in general will change and evolve as you yourself change and evolve. That what one movie will mean to you will be altered by the life that you live, that a movie you encountered at age 15 which maybe you didn’t connect with fully might hit you like a piledriver when you reach 30. That you may look back at a review you wrote five years and wonder to yourself, “What the fuck was I thinking?” That’s kind of what it’s all about, but it’s also loads of fun when you look back at a review or a rating and think to yourself, “Damn I really nailed that shit.”
Much like this Substack, I approach movie watching this way because I think it’s fun. If I wasn’t enjoying it then why would I be doing it? I usually know when an interest stops being a good time because it starts to feel like a chore, thankfully this has not happened with my movie reviewing and I don’t think it will. Hopefully my reviews will become a bit more ‘educated’ or my specific takes a bit more nuanced, but I hope I don’t stop writing them.
Thank You For Your Time. - LG
Side Note: Goodreads does not allow half-stars which is incredibly frustrating and part of the reason I use a self-made software to keep track of my books along with my Goodreads use.
Side Note: I also review and rate albums, though on a much smaller scale, and I have the rule that I listen to the album at least twice before giving a score for this reason.