What Film Critics Get Wrong About Movies (A Filmmaker's View)

Most online film criticism is not criticism. It is comedy wearing a critic's coat, and millions of viewers mistake the jokes for a verdict. What film critics get wrong, from the perspective of someone who has spent fifteen years cutting films, is simple: they count flaws instead of weighing intentions. The first question of any honest critique is what the movie was trying to be. Almost nobody online asks it.

The director, the joke video, and the ten million verdicts

A few years ago, CinemaSins released an "Everything Wrong With" video about Kong: Skull Island. The film's director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, responded on Twitter in a string of tweets, saying the video was unfair to the years of work his crew had put in. The channel's fans rushed to defend it. The video was just a joke, they said. Never meant to be taken seriously.

Both sides had a point, which is what makes the episode worth sitting with. I believe the people behind CinemaSins when they say the videos are just fun. But here is the conundrum the format never resolves: if a joke reaches ten million people and a fraction take it as a real review, the disclaimer does not matter. That fraction walks away believing the movie is bad, and some will never buy the ticket. A crew of hundreds worked for years. A ten-minute comedy video gets the last word.

Fifteen years of cutting films taught me to feel both sides in my gut. I love a sharp joke about a movie. I have also sat in edit bays at 2 AM trying to save a dying scene, and I know what it costs the people on the other side of the punchline. Most of what the internet calls criticism never gets there.

What film critics get wrong, in three habits

Good criticism asks what the movie was trying to be, then measures whether it got there. Nitpicking just counts the dents.

The first thing critics get wrong is the oldest: confusing a joke for an argument. The "sins" format is built on rapid-fire observations, and many are funny. But funny is not the same as true. In the Ghost in the Shell video, one "sin" mocked an action scene for cutting between two locations, as if cross-cutting were a mistake instead of a century-old technique. When the observations are this loose, the audience absorbs a mood rather than a case. And with millions of subscribers, that mood becomes the movie's reputation.

The second is aiming at people instead of work. Even Honest Trailers, usually fair enough that filmmakers themselves enjoy it, slipped in its Amazing Spider-Man 2 video by naming the writers and telling viewers to lower their expectations because of who wrote it. That shot was lazy: one cited film, Star Trek Into Darkness, was generally well received, and Revenge of the Fallen was developed during the writers' strike, meaning the credited writers did not write it in any normal sense. Millions heard a verdict about two human beings that did not survive five minutes of research.

The third is the quietest and most human: critics mistake their own wounds for objectivity. The clearest case I know is a self-dissection. Filmento, who makes his own "everything wrong" videos, once turned the format on himself and admitted the engine behind it: as a teenager he had spent days writing sins for CinemaSins' Iron Man 3 video, sent them in, and none were used. The adult was still carrying that rejection, and it had curdled into videos that sacrificed actual points for unfunny jokes. I respect the honesty. It is also proof that criticism written from a grudge is not criticism. It is therapy with an upload schedule.

What the good ones do instead

Once you know what film critics get wrong, the ones who get it right stand out fast. Three examples from the same corner of the internet.

The first is a Bond breakdown of Spectre that I keep returning to as a model. It opens by admitting what works: the action is great, the film looks impressive even without Roger Deakins. Then it stays at the scene level. The Rome car chase looks terrific until you realize Bond's Aston Martin was just established as practically bulletproof, so why is he fleeing a man in a normal supercar? The killer observation is structural: the movie is fine until the third act, which feels like it belongs to a different, worse film. That is criticism. It names what was attempted, shows where the attempt broke, and leaves you understanding the film better than before.

The second is a dissection of PewDiePie's Marvel criticism that stayed fair even though its maker is a self-declared fan. On "too many Marvel movies," it grants the point: the franchise mentality is real, driven by the same economics that keep any successful creator repeating what works. On representation, it admits its younger self agreed with PewDiePie, then walks through why that view was incomplete: a film's importance is not measured by whether it mattered to you. It even finds the upside in the MCU's size, a built-in audience that lets studios take risks on films like Black Panther. Separating the argument from the persona is what separates a critic from a heckler.

The third is iDubbbz and Content Cop, the most feared criticism series on YouTube, and the reason it works is instructive. It is infrequent, which makes each episode an event. It does the research. And it only targets people who, in some form, deserve it. Earned targets, real research, and the discipline not to swing at everyone for views: that is the whole formula.

Key points

• Most online criticism confuses a joke for an argument. A punchline about cross-cutting is not an analysis of the scene.
• A fraction of millions of viewers will take comedy as a verdict, and that verdict costs real crews real money.
• Single out moments, never people. Naming writers on thin research surrenders the moral high ground.
• Criticism written from a grudge is therapy with an upload schedule. The audience always figures it out.
• Good criticism is specific and scene-level: it admits what works, then shows exactly where the attempt broke.
• Separate the argument from the persona. Answer the strongest version of the other side, especially when you like the critic.

Try this

• Watch any "everything wrong with" style video and sort each joke into two piles: fair observations and cheap shots. If more than half land in the cheap pile, you are watching comedy, not criticism.
• Pick a movie you dislike and write down three things it does well before one complaint. If you cannot find three, you have not watched it closely enough.
• Watching assignment: watch the Rome car chase in Spectre and notice the difference between a vague complaint ("this chase is boring") and a specific one ("his car was just established as bulletproof"). Only make the second kind.