Feedback Friday: Your glorious career in film criticism (Patreon)

In an effort to streamline the podcast and encourage a little more conversation around some of the feedback letters we receive, we're putting some of them here and responding to them individually. This week, a listener asks us about a career in film criticism. Adam writes:

Hey NPS fam! I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how one would get into a career in film criticism and what you consider to be the most important attributes, skillsets, what have you, that go into a successful career as a film critic.

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Scott says:

A career in film criticism. Oof.

The most honest answer I can give here is that staff writing jobs in film criticism are nearly impossible to get in 2022. And if you’re a freelancer, film reviews are the worst-paying, least-desired article type possible. When I started writing for The A.V. Club full time in summer of 1999, most city dailies and alt-weeklies had multiple critics on staff—to say nothing of magazines and other outlets—but even then, the internet was starting to chip away at the business. 

As a teenage cinephile outside of Atlanta, I read a lot of reviews by Eleanor Ringel, who was the chief critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, because I did not have access to other papers and critics around the country. I say that not to insult Ringel, who was good at her job, but the moment you could read any critic from any outlet, the value of local critics (and critics in general) started to diminish, along with the fortunes of journalism more generally. When dozens and dozens of reviews of a single film are released at the same time and aggregated on sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, you can see how redundancy might be an issue. My career has been a long game of musical chairs in which outlets and jobs have been taken away, and you have to keep scrambling to find yourself a seat.

That’s the grim reality of the field, and I don’t feel like it’s a great idea to sugarcoat it. Nevertheless, I do have some advice that I hope will be helpful. For one, film critics in 2022 cannot expect to write reviews for a living. That was my primary job when I started in 1999, but I’ve had to diversify my work quite a bit, which means learning how to master essays, long-form features, interviews, and lists, as well as podcasting, editing, and filling in other gaps in the editorial calendar. (There was even a time, mercifully brief, when I reviewed video games.) Film criticism is a narrow field, so the more you can edge into the role of “culture writer,” a Jack- or Jill-of-all-trades, the better off you’ll be. And as Stephen Malkmus puts it in the Pavement song “Range Life,” “You gotta pay your dues / before you pay the rent.” This means that you will often start in a humble place: I wrote for student newspapers in undergrad and grad school, but now you might have to chip away in smaller digital outlets while you hone your craft and build up a body of work that might get others to take notice.

As for the act of criticism itself, I would say not to approach it casually. Film and film writing has to be an obsession, which mean you have to be voracious in your viewing habits and curious about how film critics, past and present, express themselves. You’ll find your own voice over time, but you need this baseline of knowledge that you can draw upon. I also think you have to be open to what a film is attempting to do and meet it on its own terms: I often say that a film tells you what it wants to be and it doesn’t make sense to wish that it was another type of film entirely. (Related: Never suggest what you would have done differently had you made the film. Critics who do that are embarrassingly off about 99% of the time.) But generally, I’d ask from a critic what I want as a reader, which are reviews that are clear, concise, and evocative. You have to care about language. You have to care about making strong arguments. And you have to care an awful lot about movies—because, as they say about poker, this is a hard way to make an easy living.