The structural problems with mainstream film criticism, and what serious cinema writing actually requires.
The mainstream film-criticism landscape of 2026 produces a substantial volume of writing about films. Most of it is bad. This essay tries to lay out why and what serious cinema writing actually requires.
The dominant institutional structure of contemporary film criticism is the aggregator. Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and similar platforms collect individual reviewers' verdicts and reduce them to a single percentage score. The aggregator-driven system has, across roughly the past twenty years, substantially restructured how mainstream criticism is produced. Reviews are written to be classified as either 'fresh' or 'rotten' by the aggregator — the binary judgment is what gets surfaced to the broader audience.
What this produces, structurally, is a system in which the actual content of the review matters less than the verdict it produces. A review's nuance, specific argument, and writerly quality are largely irrelevant; what matters is whether the aggregator-readable score is positive or negative. Reviewers who want their work to be widely-read learn to write in a register that produces clear verdicts. The structural incentive is against the kind of complex argument that serious cinema writing requires.
The economics of contemporary film publishing have, across the past two decades, substantially deteriorated. Most legacy print publications have reduced their film-criticism staff to a single reviewer or to a rotating set of freelancers. The major newspapers' film sections have shrunk; the film-focused magazines (Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope) operate on much smaller budgets than they did in the 1990s and 2000s. Online-only publications have largely failed to support serious film criticism at sustainable economic levels.
What this means in practice is that the small number of professional film critics still working are typically writing more reviews per week than their predecessors of the 1980s or 1990s would have written. The volume requirement reduces the time any individual review can receive. The structural incentive is toward shorter, more-formulaic reviews that can be produced quickly rather than toward longer, more-considered essays.
The canonical figure of late-20th-century American film criticism is Pauline Kael, whose work in The New Yorker from 1968 through 1991 represents, by general consensus, the high-water mark of the form. Kael's reviews were typically 2,000-4,000 words. They engaged the film at the level of specific scenes, performances, and craft decisions. They placed the film within the broader contemporary cinema landscape. They argued positions that were sometimes controversial and frequently contested.
What Kael's work required, structurally, was the institutional support of a publication willing to commission longer reviews, the time to develop genuine engagement with the films, and an audience willing to read the resulting work. All three structural conditions have substantially weakened since Kael's working period. The successors to Kael's role — David Thomson, Manohla Dargis, Jonathan Rosenbaum, A.O. Scott in his prime, various others — have worked in increasingly constrained conditions.
Serious cinema writing has, in the contemporary period, partly migrated to alternative formats. The video-essay tradition (Every Frame a Painting, Nerdwriter, Patrick H. Willems, the Lessons from the Screenplay channel) produces longer-form analysis at higher production value than print criticism typically supports. The podcast tradition (The Big Picture, Filmspotting, various others) produces extended conversation-form criticism that print cannot match.
Substack and similar publishing platforms have, more recently, enabled individual critics to produce longer-form work independently of legacy publication structures. The economic model is uneven — most Substack film writers do not produce sustainable incomes — but the structural alternative to the aggregator-driven system has begun to emerge.
Three structural requirements recur across the canonical examples of serious cinema writing. First: time with the film. Serious writing engages individual sequences in detail, which requires either multiple viewings or extremely careful attention during a single viewing. Most mainstream reviews are written on a single viewing without the opportunity to rewatch.
Second: breadth of reference. Serious writing places the film within the broader history of similar work, the director's catalogue, and the specific genre or formal tradition. Most mainstream reviews lack this referential depth because the reviewer does not have time to do the comparative work.
Third: a position the writer is willing to defend. Serious cinema writing argues something specific about the film; the verdict is the conclusion of the argument rather than the entire content. Most mainstream reviews offer a verdict without sufficient argument to support it; the writing is, in some sense, decorative rather than argumentative.
The structural problem with most contemporary movie reviews is that they meet none of these three requirements. The aggregator-driven, economics-constrained, time-pressured review is, by structural design, the opposite of what serious cinema writing needs. The work that does meet the requirements increasingly appears outside the conventional review format — in video essays, podcasts, and longer-form publication contexts that the aggregator system has not yet captured.