The Fiction of the Objective Review

Two people can leave the same screening having watched the same images, heard the same dialogue and followed the same story, yet carry entirely different films home with them. One finds the pacing hypnotic; another spends the final forty minutes negotiating with their bladder and the exit sign. One recognises tenderness in a performance; another sees affectation. Neither response automatically reveals a failure of attention. A film enters a person carrying their memory, temperament, politics, culture, expectations and previous encounters with cinema. The work may be fixed. The experience never is.

Criticism becomes valuable because a thoughtful critic can make that experience legible. They can examine structure, recognise references, locate a film within history, analyse technique and notice consequences the filmmaker may never have intended. Expertise sharpens perception. It also sharpens the language through which preference can be explained. A critic who has spent twenty years studying horror will probably tell us more about a horror film than someone who wandered into Screen Four because Screen Three was sold out. Yet expertise still encounters taste. When the critic says a scene is excessive, tedious, moving or exhilarating, we have crossed from description into relationship.

The critic sees the film through a trained eye. It remains their eye.

Ratings make this ambiguity wonderfully visible. An encounter involving performance, sound, editing, politics, memory and two hours of somebody's life eventually becomes 3.5 stars. Aggregate enough of these judgements and subjectivity begins wearing the costume of statistics. An 87% approval rating looks reassuringly measurable, although what it measures is consensus within a particular group under a particular system. The number can tell us how people responded. The metaphysical quantity of “goodness” remains inconveniently unavailable.

Consensus nevertheless feels powerful because taste also helps us belong. We gather around filmmakers, genres, critics and publications whose sensibilities resemble our own. Their approval can reassure us that we have understood something correctly; their dislike can make us reconsider an enthusiasm we felt quite comfortably ten minutes earlier. Fromm wrote extensively about the human desire for orientation and belonging, and cinema offers its own harmless-looking version of that need. Taste becomes identity. The critic we trust becomes part interpreter, part cultural companion, sometimes part permission slip.

Filmmakers participate in this fiction too. A glowing review becomes evidence that the work succeeded; a hostile one mysteriously becomes evidence that the reviewer misunderstood it. Festival laurels are displayed prominently while mediocre ratings acquire lengthy methodological explanations. Human beings have developed an impressive capacity to believe in objective judgement precisely when it agrees with them.

A healthier relationship with criticism treats every review as information about an encounter. Repeated confusion may reveal a communication problem. An unexpected interpretation may expose something inside the work worth examining. A critic's resistance may reveal the limits of the film, the critic, or simply the relationship between them. The filmmaker has to decide which.

Perhaps that is also criticism's greatest gift. A critic can give us context, attention and another way of seeing. They can enlarge our relationship with a film without completing it on our behalf.

The lights come up. Somebody loved it. Somebody hated it. Somebody remains uncertain.

The film has stayed exactly where it was.

The judgement belongs to us.