How To Write About Film

an introduction

First things first, I’m not selling you anything. If it’s helpful and you would like to support me financially, you can always become a paid subscriber. But even if I write more essays like this, they will always go out initially as free posts.¹

Writing and thinking and talking about film is perhaps the only thing in the world where I have true, unqualified confidence in my abilities. If you like this and want more of it, let me know. I would happy to add or expand upon several points in this list.

This piece will be structured around a host of loosely ordered principles which have served as my anchor over the past decade. They are the result of sage line-edits from my mentors, inside jokes with my friends, and many nights pacing back and forth in my apartment, replaying a movie in my head while I run my hand against the doorframe, the desk, the cabinet, the wall, the picture frame.

Take what you like and leave the rest.

Cultivate Real Taste

When you hear someone these days refer to “taste,” they usually fall into two camps. 1: They are trend forecasters who are intellectually aimless and parroting marketing copy out of boredom. 2: They are part of the Silicon Valley nu-bourgeoise and they are out to destroy everything you love. Unfortunately, there is no better word to describe what I mean, though I will offer this definition:

Taste is about hosting an ever-expanding array of lenses with which to see a work, while simultaneously making your internal lens as precise as possible. Taste is about curiosity and shutting up as much as it is about self-knowledge.

On that point…

Give Up The Ghost of AMC A-List

Look, go with God. It would probably save me money to get one of these programs. But rep cinema and watching something at home will frequently serve you better than the week’s new releases. The best way to get to know cinema is to watch as many different types of movies as you can, and to keep trying genres and filmmakers until you can crack them for yourself. The variance in what might be available on a Roku if you’re willing to put up with Ozempic ad breaks is going totally outpace the variance at a chain theater. If you make a point to mostly watch older movies, you’ll become a better and more interesting writer. You’ll spend a greater portion of your time watching movies that are rewarding and even pleasurable.² You’ll have a better idea of what you like.

Turn Off Movies If You’re Not Liking Them

Seriously. I do it all the time. You can always go back if someone urges you to reconsider, or after you’re gotten some context that might let the film open to you. Most rentals are 48 hours, even. There is always tomorrow.

Change Your Mind

Once your realize that you are not the movies you like, it becomes easier to do this. You are more than your opinions, but they are a part of you. It can be easy to grow attached to them, because for the critic, that is a part of you that receives external validation. But it may take years to truly sort out why you even dislike a film. By that time, you may have developed a softness for its other fragments. In the end, the content of an opinion is not worth being precious about like that.

Read Old Film Writing

If you clicked on this in the first place, you know people that follow. It is probably that you follow these people for recommendations, or to simply keep abreast of culture. If you ever want a list of working critics I adore, I will happily list off friends and inspirations alike by the dozens. But that’s not really good advice, is it?

This is the most pragmatic I will be in this entire post. Here’s what you should do. You should get a subscription to Film Comment. Next time you bounce off a film, see if there’s any writing on it in Film Comment. Read whatever comes up. Read other things published in the same issue. Read other things by that writer. There plenty of amazing work outside of that ecosystem, obviously. But I cannot think of a more comprehensive single resource, one that points elsewhere in so many different directions. Besides, if you pay for something - and you should pay for Film Comment! - you will feel bad if you don’t use it. Shame is my biggest motivator, personally, and Film Comment is the magazine that taught me how to write.

Develop A Relationship To Theory

It will benefit you to understand Marxism even if you are not a Marxist. It will benefit you to have read Laura Mulvey, always. It will benefit you to know what Lacanian thought looks like in practice so you can make fun of it (just kidding). It will benefit you to know where you stand on Hegel - specifically, it will benefit you to hate him (kidding a little less).

Treat your relationship to theory generally as submissive, noncommittal, imperfect, unresolved - but it is good to become intimately familiar with the thinkers that interest you. Personally, I love Deleuze and Walter Benjamin and Frederic Jameson and David Bordwell and Jasbir Puar and Saadiya Hartman. It will be evident which thinkers resonate with you in your writing (which is good!), though it should not feel derivative.

Some will tell you that good politics are necessary for good criticism. Unfortunately that is not true. Armond White is proof of this, and many brilliant leftist pundits are proof of the inverse.

Study Blocking Over Cinematography

Like pretty pictures, “walking back and forth” will lose its inherent luster eventually. But it will be more productive to fixate on gimmicks that require motion rather than things which can be communicated in a still image.

The Writing Is The Important Part

You’re not a programmer. You can have compelling opinions and effortful taste but none of it will be worth shit if you can’t write a good sentence.

Becoming a good writer is a gradual process. I have three pieces of advice for how to get good at it:

1. Sentences are bobbin-lace. They are automatic, finicky, prone to minor, disruptive error. We will make seven bad versions of a sentence before we make a good one, only to promptly forget what made it work in the first place. Sentences will have a different rhythm in the mind than they do on the page, a different rhythm on the page than they do spoken out loud. We get better at it slowly. You will produce good work and you will not know for years; all you will be able to see is the one line you fucked up.

2. It is important to read because then you know a complete thing “works.” If you stared at the undercarriage of 1,000 cars you’d have a better sense for their machinations than someone armed with a generic annotated diagram. Try to anticipate what the boundaries and contradictions of an essay will be before you write it. If it reads in your head like a 5-paragraph essay, throw it out. Good structure happens when the restraints you’ve given yourself are invisible to the reader.

3. Don’t worry about developing a voice. For a while, your work will read plainly as an amalgamation of everything you have liked reading recently. Eventually those seams will only be visible to you; then they will disappear altogether. Only then, once you are truly comfortable with the linguistic and aesthetic breadth of your words, will you be able to consciously hone your voice. As long as writing feels like picking dandruff, you’re good.

That makes it feel kind of mystical, and it is. Criticism may be the bastard child of academic abstracts and marketing copy, but it is, in the end, an art form.

Write For Yourself, Not For Exposure

It will benefit you more to have a piece on your Letterboxd or Substack then it will to have your piece on any website that won’t pay you. Besides, especially if you start doing this professionally, it’s worth it to keep regularly doing it for free, for yourself. It will seem counterintuitive, but it will help you burn out less to remember that there is an inherent reward to the practice.

Work With An Editor When You Can

Having someone that close to a piece makes the process of becoming a better writer much swifter, and sometimes the stark changes that result from such speedy evolution of your prose can offer further insights you would never have received from the slow, solitary process. Every time I work with an editor, even a bad one, I am better for it. I am grateful to receive such thoughtful-yet-unaffectionate attention.

Nothing You Write Down Should Be Obligatory

Summarize the film insofar as a person who has not seen it could understand what you are describing. There is never a good reason to have a synopsis that is longer than whatever point you want to make about it.

Similarly, you’re not filling out a checklist. If a certain performance, or shot composition, or leitmotif doesn’t matter to what you’re trying to say, I don’t want to hear about it.

Being Contrarian Is a Good Impulse

…in moderation. We are told what to think by falsified UGC campaigns and undisclosed ads. You “know” the dominant narrative around a film before going in, and you’ll be doubly aware of it afterwards. It is not counterproductive, then, to poke around when you’re in the thick of it. For artists, their work is a space to explore their ideas. Why should your criticism be any different?

Nothing You Write Is Definitive, Either

You are not the only person who will cover a film. Most of the time, you won’t even be the first. This should humble you and free you. I am not well-suited to write about many of my favorite films, nor do I want my work to stand as the sole critical touchpoint for any reader.

If you feel ill-equipped to talk about the historical context of a film, don’t. Read others who do and cite their work in your piece instead. Go other places with it; no need to disrespect the work of others through cheap regurgitation. That sneaky elitism is still unproductive, even if anti-intellectualism is worse. Your thoughts are worth something if they are specific, but they are not better than any other writer’s specificities.

Write Wildly Personal Essays

I am uninterested in the directly analogous lines between a film and a life, in reclamation or healing or self-actualization.

I am extremely interested in the situations under which you saw a film, what else happened that day, what you were reading in the lobby beforehand, how long you scoured Reddit to source a costume from the movie for your personal wardrobe, what appointment you ditched to make it to the screening, what line of dialogue sounded totally different in the film compared to when your coworker happened to say the exact same thing a week later.

Avoid Hyperbole

I’m really really fucking bad at this one. And ultimately, it’s good for driving engagement to include it. But no piece of mine has ever been improved by me calling something a “masterpiece.”

A quote I will paraphrase here for lack of a known source goes something like “Criticism is listing off everything you like and everything you don’t.” This is true, even though my favorite film writing is rarely concerned with qualitative judgement. It is actually quite hard to figure out to identify what you like, even when you know you like it. There is nothing more effusive than a proper, vivid summation of its essence.

Write As Few Words As Possible

You’re not writing a mathematical proof - let some things slip, let yourself be misinterpreted not out of sloppiness but out of a profound trust in your audience’s capacity for inference. If you write with clarity, those who read you in bad-faith will only make a fool of themselves.

That Being Said - Maximalism Is Good

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Be Funny

This will help with the above, because just trying to be funny makes you more concise and more clear. It’s a crutch, but one that’s better to lean on and than lean away from.

Cinephilia Cannot Be Your Personality

…unless you’re a teenager, then it’s fine; you’ve got enough on your plate as it is. But if you’re an adult, you need other interests. Tinker with your bike, get involved with organized, start DJ-ing,³ whatever. Go out dancing or swim in the lake or help babysit your friend’s kid or reorganize your room. Get to know your neighbors. This is trite advice for an artist, but critics rarely think of themselves as artists. But like anything creative, criticism (especially that which is produced in periods of aggressive formalist thought) can turn claustrophobic and deflated. You can tell, when reading a piece of criticism, whether that person had a full conversation with a stranger that day.

You Have To Know Other Art

You have to read books. You have to listen to music. You have to go to the museum, or play video games. You have to purchase cheap tickets to a live performance. Cinema will not teach you enough to get by.

You Should Have A Second Thing

You should have a practice that you are content to let humble you, an area where you are willing to be a forever amateur. There is a chance criticism is that for you; that’s awesome, and we need more of that. Film criticism was my hobbyist thing, but I locked in too hard. Happens to the best of us. I tried film photography and it hasn’t stuck. I wonder if I would like woodworking.

Sometimes, You Are A Stan

This is actually one of the best parts about writing film criticism. The Cahiers cohort were proud disciples for the films they loved. Paramount let Robert Altman retain Final Cut on Nashville after his friend Pauline Kael published an effusive review of it in the New Yorker five months before its first public screening.

I make a concerted effort to reach out to press contacts for low-budget, independent, and foreign films that pique my interest. If I like those films, I make an effort to write about them wherever I can. This could (uncharitably but correctly) be called unpaid advertising. I prefer to say “I am a cheerleader for the medium.”

Once you have a specific taste, once you know what you like, once you have an audience that trusts you, you get to do something really cool: You get to share art you love with people who are receptive to it, and in the process support films that literally could not afford to purchase that kind of attention. Don’t do it for clout, don’t do it in response to interpersonal pressures. Be sincere - remember, this is not an obligatory thing. Be humble, too - nobody cares what you think that much. But it makes a difference. This is what you get to contribute.

You Cannot Go Into This Expecting It To Be Your Job

Most likely it will be a compulsion, craft, the locus of a social sphere. For people like me, it will turn out to be a labor-intensive, barely-lucrative side hustle. There are maybe two dozen salaried positions in the United State for film journalists. Every single person who got one of those positions is nice and passionate and a diligent worker. But it is not a meritocracy; these people are lucky, and they know it. Most salaried film critics - even those whose work I dislike - do, in fact, deserve whatever gig they’ve got. The problem is that most contract writers would be just as deserving.

Nothing I Say Is Gospel, Except For This: Do Not Let Your Bitterness Outweigh Your Affection

Sincere criticism, even at its most venomous, is an act of great care. You are refusing to dismiss something that bores and perturbs you. You are refusing to let bad art lay limp. But I’m not really talking about the work itself here.

Having an ekphrastic craft that is financially precarious and half-niche means you will be surrounded at all times by jealousy, antagonism, passive-aggression, and insecurity. We are on the bottom floor of a sinking ship and some people are being especially protective of their toilet paper flotillas. This snide attitude will come both from other writers, from artists who consider themselves in opposition to you rather than in conversation, from readers who treat you like the last vestige of a Sky Mall imaginary. You, too, will subconsciously fall into a habit of arbitrarily distancing yourself from your peers.

Thus you must actively choose not to be a little shit. It is always in your best interest to be nice and normal, barring any true moral objections. This is not a solitary exercise. Talking to other critics, like intellectual peers and also human beings, is far more sustainable than the alternative. You will discover you have been unreasonable and uncharitable in your assessments of those around you for purely selfish reasons.

I am not pleading with you to use kiddie gloves; I can take it as much as I dish it. But a lot of critics do believe it is beneficial to nurture their own superiority complex. I’m not going to tell you that assholes never make for good critics, but that’s an entirely unnecessary and false trade-off.

Look, I could never do this alone. You would not be reading me right now - I would not still be writing in the first place! - without the critics, colleagues, friends and mentors that have lifted up my voice. One day I hope to pay that favor forward. Perhaps this post is my first step in doing so.

I have more to say about sentences, negativity, study, the position of the critic in contemporary culture, but I will save that for another time.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx

1. Everything on my newsletter gets paywalled eventually but if you need an individual essay or two after the fact, or can’t afford it for whatever reason, you can reach out to me and I’ll send you a copy of whatever you’d like for free!

2. Whether or not “movies were better before,” it’s certainly true that the movies getting restorations from Janus or Muscle will be, on average, better than whatever they’re playing at the multiplex on a given Tuesday

3. Can you tell all my friends are trans people in their late twenties?