Jonathan Rosenbaum

The following was written as my second planned monthly column for the Chicago Reader, after the first of these (https://chicagoreader.com/film-tv/moving-places/against-targeting-advertising-language-trump/) ran in their March issue. The paper decided it wasn’t currently equipped to handle editing articles by freelancers so they paid me for this piece but decided not to run it or to run any future columns of mine, at least for the time being. They also emphasized that they would be open to future “pitches” of mine, assuming that I would want to offer any.

I’m posting this column in two parts.

— J.R.

To speak about cinema is to not be alone. It is being in society, but in a congenial manner, with companions who have had an experience similar to yours — not identical, but similar, and this, precisely, is what makes conversation possible. [André] Bazin said over and over that he much preferred leading a ciné-club discussion to writing a film review.
Jacques Aumont

Does film criticism still exist? Ask people my age or thereabouts (I’ve just turned 83) and they will probably say no. Certainly the number of reviewers who’ve lost their jobs in recent years suggests a profession in its death throes. But ask someone who’s 30 or younger and she or he is more apt to say we’re living in a golden age. And it’s possible both answers are correct, because the same term means different things to different people. Skeptics could argue it’s a renaissance for nonprofessionals, but feeling closer to the optimists, I’d argue that “professional” film critics usually means those who get paid, and within my own experience, those who get paid are most often the ones who don’t know more about film than their editors do. Experts are felt to be intimidating, even pretentious.

What do we mean by “film criticism”, anyway? Reviews? Descriptions? Reflections? Consumer advice? Theory? Information? Evaluation? Philosophy? Aesthetics? Breezy showbiz chitchat? Sociology? Politics? Or maybe just discussion, as Jacques Aumont puts it in his Introduction to The André Bazin Reader (2022), a 610-page Canadian book translated and edited by Timothy Barnard? For me it’s the best collection of perhaps the greatest film critic (1918-1958), but you can’t legally buy it in the U.S. because it’s in competition with older and inferior Bazin collections. If you equate film criticism with consumer advice, I’m not even supposed to tell many of you that such a book exists. Similarly, our news frequently proceeds according to the notion that if we can’t buy or control something, we’re better off remaining ignorant about it. But as a journalist, I sometimes like to report on what we might be missing.

Fortunately, post-screening discussions about movies haven’t been outlawed, but they’ve certainly been discouraged in most mainstream venues when they aren’t strictly promotional. Those who’ve attended the Cannes film festival or any test marketing preview know that snap judgments are the lingua franca of the film industry, matching the thumbs up/thumbs down protocol of TV reviewing. Second thoughts — including what you might think a week later — aren’t illegal but they’re considered financially irrelevant, which almost amounts to same thing.

As for the younger optimists regarding film culture, fashion plays a significant role in addition to generational differences. Consider the Sunday New York Times Magazine over the past three decades, from Susan Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema” (a retitled and re-edited version of “A Century of Cinema”), a doleful elegy about cinephilia, in the February 25, 1996 issue, to Alexandra Kleeman’s “Everyone’s a Critic”, a celebratory account of Letterboxd, a web site for movie buffs, in the February 15, 2026 issue. The Sontag piece excluded most of the names of the international filmmakers she’d mentioned, including Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr, following the premise that Times readers don’t like to encounter names they aren’t already familiar with. But the Kleeman piece is illustrated with such Letterboxd blurbs as those by “Hillary” about Tarr’s Sátántangó (“I just watched a 7 hour movie with the love of my life. I really am the luckiest girl in the world.”) and by “Neill” about A Confucian Confusion (“From now on I think all filmmakers should have to get Edward Yang’s permission to use the color blue”).

SATANTANGO/A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION

I wouldn’t call these blurbs film criticism, but as parts of ongoing exchanges about “difficult” (i.e., challenging) films, they’re more energizing than the Times’ capitalist censorship in 1996. In a similar spirit, Sontag once said she could gladly watch Sátántango once a year for the rest of her life, and I feel the same way. Furthermore, even though most Times readers have never heard of A Confucian Confusion, they might be intrigued to learn from Kleeman that a couple of years ago, “a Film at Lincoln Center series on [Edward] Yang’s films was the highest-grossing retrospective in the institution’s history.” At the same time that mainstream reviewers and film professors continue to ignore one another, Letterboxd’s scrappy and diversified niche-market has grown since 2020 from 1.7 million users to 26 million, adding more than nine million during the past year alone.

What we don’t learn from Kleeman is that the two founders of Letterboxd in 2011 are New Zealanders, confirming my conviction that the best early film-related sites, like Senses of Cinema and Screening the Past, come from the same neglected corner of the globe. Though I’m just as provincial about the differences between the film cultures of Australia and New Zealand as many European critics are about distinguishing the U.S. from Canada, I suspect that those cultures could be more advanced than ours when it comes to criticism, even if the Times might consider it unfashionable to say so. All three times that I’ve attended the Melbourne film festival, I’ve never once seen a viewer reach for a mobile during a screening.

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Film critics allegedly help us decide what’s good and what’s bad. But because the meaning of these adjectives depends on how we’re defining film criticism, something we rarely consider, that’s far too vague to be useful. Unless we clarify what and whom something is good or bad for, such evaluation becomes valueless —as absurd as what many critics mean by the phrase “all time” regarding an art and practice that’s only slightly older than a century.

Confusing evaluation with publicity is part of what draws us to Oscars and State of the Union addresses. The most recent of the latter had the length of a movie feature and should have been called either My Favorite Gore Perpetrated by Aliens or The State of My Portfolio. Like the recent Oscar night, this show was dedicated to reselling us the same products we’ve already paid for, regardless of whether or not we actually ordered them.

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Some moviegoers go to films to escape from life while others go to experience life more fully and/or to understand it better, or at least differently. Yet what’s bad for escapists may be good for everyone else, and vice versa.

Personally, I define a film critic as someone who joins a public discussion already in progress that will continue after the critic leaves. Critics should have neither the first word nor the last but should intervene in some positive way, expanding the options.

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ar less to me than the five lead characters: a “homely” housemaid (Dorothy McGuire) and a former pilot with a disfigured face (Robert Young) who fall deeply in love and thus seemingly lose their facial imperfections inside the eponymous cottage (an enchanted character in its own right, a former haven for honeymooners) with the guidance of another housemaid (a luminous Mildred Natwick) and a blind pianist and friend (Herbert Marshall) who lives next door. Individually and collectively, they’re a sweet bunch.

Nevertheless, as a child I couldn’t understand why the movie described Dorothy McGuire as “homely” even though she looked like a glamorous movie star and so did Robert Young, whose disfigurement (a scar and a slightly twisted mouth) seemed less ugly than it was supposed to be. This was clearly a matter of cross-purposes: scrambling and confusing Hollywood signals to keep us identifying with the couple’s euphoric mutual love (the “likable” part), meanwhile keeping them in semidarkness to make sure our own sensitivities, like theirs, weren’t being too seriously tested. Yet my recent disbelief carried as many beguiling lessons as my faltering belief. Why must we pretend that everyone experiences these discrepancies in the same way? To assign a single ultimate value to many possible readings is to commit a criminal act, yet that’s what the marketers usually expect from us. Only the insultingly inaccurate postulate that we all go to movies for the same reasons, and even wind up with identical experiences and understandings, could justify such a slander.

I saw the first two movies in sparsely attended auditoriums, the third at home and alone, and because the generative theme of The Enchanted Cottage is loneliness, this felt appropriate. But as with both Kellys, it might have been an even richer experience if I could have joined a group discussion about it afterwards.