The hottest Film criticism Substack posts right now

The movie is presented as another sign that Hollywood has fallen into moral, artistic, and creative ruin.
The industry’s diversity and inclusion mandates are depicted as politicized rules that undermine artistic freedom and provoke deep resentment among filmmakers.
A top auteur is imagined retaliating by staging a big prank or satirical stunt to expose and mock the petty politicking in modern Hollywood.

People have a natural tendency called apophenia to see patterns and make stories out of random events, a trait that once helped survival but now often fuels conspiracy and confirmation bias.
Reading past art as prophetic is risky because coincidence can be mistaken for meaning, yet people do it to validate their beliefs and feel on the right side of history.
The Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is visually striking and, in the context of Iran’s unrest, contains moments that feel eerily prophetic, echoing the courage of women who have risked everything to defy the government.

Inherent Vice is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film because its loose, comedic, and shaggy style hides a deep, humane sadness and a standout Joaquin Phoenix performance.
When great directors let go of solemn gravitas and embrace messy, undignified comedy they can reach truer, more compassionate work, as seen in Inherent Vice and Raising Arizona.
The film uses noir’s foggy, unresolved plotting to show emotional truths about loss, the end of the 1960s counterculture, and people who keep trying to care even when the world won’t reciprocate.

The film sets out to critique American individualistic ambition, but its glossy style and star-making spectacle end up glamorizing the same monomania it aims to condemn.
It’s beautifully made and thrilling to watch with strong performances, yet it offers little interior depth and the emotional payoff, especially the ending, feels unearned.
By mixing marketing, celebrity, and art, the movie reflects and reinforces a cultural obsession with measurable success and spectacle over communal or moral values.

Movies don't have to have a clear moral — sometimes a film can just be a story or 'a bunch of stuff that happened' and that's perfectly fine.
What plays out on screen often leads viewers to draw a logical takeaway that may be different from what the filmmaker intended, and those unintended messages can be powerful.
Trying to force big, explicit statements can backfire or produce harmful readings, so focusing on storytelling over preaching is often the wiser choice.

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Rate movies using multiple factors, not just a single number — consider ambition/quality, pacing, message, emotional impact, and whether it fits you personally. This five-part approach explains why some critically praised films still feel wrong for you.
Critical scores are increasingly noisy for personal taste, so use trailers, audience signals (like IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes), and your gut "I'm in" reaction to decide what to watch. Critics are best at flagging stinkers, but personal fit and immediate excitement predict enjoyment more reliably.
Seeing films in theaters meaningfully boosts enjoyment, memberships that make marginal cost $0 are worth it, and while you get diminishing returns as you watch more films, the hobby remains rewarding and worth continuing.

People have a deep need to be accepted and belong, and that need often feels beyond their control.
Pride, envy, and an inability to accept others can create loneliness and conflict, even in otherwise good circumstances.
Finding peace comes from accepting your life and accepting others; if you want to be loved, start by loving others.

Cynicism in art can come from trying too hard to manipulate emotions instead of allowing authentic feelings to develop. It's better to trust the audience to understand the story without forced sentimentality.
Shows like 'The Bear' can lose their originality by relying too much on fan service and emotional tricks, making the storytelling feel cheap and unearned.
A series can become less believable when it’s filled with too many side characters and plot holes, distracting from the main story and weakening its overall impact.

The film mashup mixes many genres and stories, turning familiar tropes into a dense, collage-like epic that feels both sprawling and familiar.
It layers striking motifs — a biblical-style sacrifice, massive whale/sea sequences, and a high-tech military that makes reckless identification and tactical choices like building a base on a giant oil refinery — creating surprising tonal shifts.
The Odyssey trailer is tightly handled: it tells the Trojan Horse story simply and effectively, evokes a realistic Late Bronze Age Anatolia, and presents Odysseus as a morally complicated, even villainous, character.

Kill Bill works better as a single, unified film and the whole cut strengthens the final twist. However, poor theatrical projection and some redundant sequences (like duplicate driving scenes) hurt the viewing experience.
Yuki’s Revenge is a Fortnite-style animated short adapted almost verbatim from an early unused chapter, showing how Yuki and Gogo were merged during rewrites. It’s entertaining but non-canonical and repeats material already present in the main film.
One-film supercuts of two-part movies are surprisingly rare even though directors and audiences show interest. Practical barriers like cost, logistics, and studio choices seem to limit more combined editions despite their creative potential.

Gus Van Sant attempted a shot-for-shot remake of 'Psycho' (1960), which was met with widespread rejection.
It is nearly impossible to recreate a film shot-for-shot due to various factors, including actors and production details.
Despite the criticism, the audacity of the experiment and the potential for reevaluation make 'Psycho' (1998) an interesting piece of filmmaking.