In a world so overwhelmingly filled with art and media, critics and reviewers have served as a filter to help people navigate the masses of content before them. After all, no one wants to spend $30 on a regular movie ticket and a medium popcorn just for the movie to end up not meeting expectations.
However, recent years have shown that the role of professional media reviewer has been headed toward the nearest exit. Chris Wei, a University of Iowa graduate student and film studies Ph.D. candidate, said this could be attributed to the versatility of social media platforms.
“For 20 years now, traditional criticism has been ‘dying,’ in part due to the internet’s ability to disperse cultural conversations about film and media,” Wei said. “Some critics and scholars have been more optimistic about these changes, while others have been more skeptical.”
Wei chooses instead to be mindful of the positives and negatives.
“TikTok and Letterboxd aren’t going to usher in a utopian golden era of highly sophisticated democratized film discourse, necessarily; but they’re also not going to turn us all into mindless vegetables, either,” he said. “At least, neither of those things will happen automatically or deterministically.”
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Platforms like Letterboxd allow people to create an account to log and review movies they have seen. It is often used as a tool for friends to connect and recommend movies to each other based on their tastes. Ciaran Hennelly, a UI first-year student, frequently uses platforms like Letterboxd for these expressed purposes.
“Whenever a new movie I want to watch comes out, I wait a week or two, and then it’s just flooded with reviews from people who watched it, even my friends,” Hennelly said. “And I trust their movie judgment. It’s so handy.”
Hennelly also mentioned the convenience and fun aspects of Letterboxd.
“There’s a little extra dopamine hit when I log my movies on it. And if there’s a movie I really enjoy, it’s super easy to find similar stuff to watch next,” Hennelly said.
Zachary Vanes, a UI graduate student and film studies Ph.D. candidate, sees Letterboxd as this generation’s version of a video rental store.
“It’s extremely valuable in the sense that it broadens people’s awareness of the options that are out there,” he said. “However, I often question the value of the site’s rating system, which can be especially unfair to low-budget or experimental work and completely irrelevant to the broader importance of a film.”
For Vanes and many other film critics, the rating systems as a whole don’t measure up to their intended purpose. Black and white rating systems like the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, or scales ranging from one to five-star ratings, cannot capture all the nuance behind a film’s production, cultural impact, and many other variables.
“The other day, I saw that ‘The Wizard of Oz’ had a 3.9 rating on the site. I suppose that’s a pretty good score, but how does that number even come close to communicating the immense cultural meaning that is attached to that film?” Vanes said. “What does a 3.9 average rating mean in the face of the generations of people who have laughed and cried and dreamed along with that film?”
Ultimately, the world of media review and criticism is far from black and white, just like the movies they work with. Traditional critical analysis as a profession may be becoming obsolete, but what has replaced it is allowing for a wider group of movie buffs to explore the cultural landscape and share their opinions.