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> most professional critics have to review every single movie This isn't true. Quite far from it, in fact. Manohla Dargis at the NY Times, for example, average

> most professional critics have to review every single movie This isn't true. Quite far from it, in fact. Manohla Dargis at the NY Times, for example, averages only about 2 reviews per week. There are many more releases than that. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone does even fewer. Same with Justin Chang at the LA Times. Etc, etc. IMO, the explanation is going to be multifactorial. Your "correct conclusion" probably explains some of the gap as critics are still obligated to review the prestige releases (even if they aren't necessarily interested in seeing them). But surely also does the divergence between the tastes of professional movie watchers and Joe Moviegoer explain the gap. What's interesting is that in over-indexing on one bias, you've probably introduced another into your own hiring process. It does seem as though picking people who are careful, independent thinkers could still yield good hires. In the end, if you get a good candidate, who cares? I'd rather be right for the wrong reasons than just being wrong.

robocat 5y ago
A comment on the article was: """ I reviewed films for the whole of the nineties for the BBC and local press in Manchester rarely missing any new releases. With this luxury and dream job though comes a responsibility and after a while it became obvious that I was suffering from Movie fatigue. It was easy to dismiss much of Hollywood’s fare as formulaic and worthless because we had seen too much and seen better. Some of the movies I panned were perfectly good films and many were extremely successful and popular with audiences, but for me they were dull, and despite fabulous production values left me cold. Mark Kermode (Film Critic BBC) was one of my contemporaries and he said: “You have to see everything so that when something comes along that is good you will really notice it.” Of course, this exacerbated the fatigue and often meant that we were too quick to judge, and after a while, very little appealed because we had set ourselves far too high a standard to be realistic about the film’s quality. If you look at the reviews in The Guardian, you will see more bad reviews that good. You might argue that a bad review is much better copy than a good review so there might be an editorial decision in there. To a certain extent Movie critics can be a poor parameter for quality and an injudicious contribution to its success or failure. After ten years of reviewing films, I knew it was time to stop. I wasn’t enjoying it and I was probably doing some disservice to the film industry. Less is so much more. Harry Stafford – The Manchester Film School """ And, perhaps Manohla Dargis and Peter Travers watch far more movies than they write reviews for.

robocat 5y ago

A comment on the article was: """ I reviewed films for the whole of the nineties for the BBC and local press in Manchester rarely missing any new releases. With this luxury and dream job though comes a responsibility and after a while it became obvious that I was suffering from Movie fatigue. It was easy to dismiss much of Hollywood’s fare as formulaic and worthless because we had seen too much and seen better. Some of the movies I panned were perfectly good films and many were extremely successful and popular with audiences, but for me they were dull, and despite fabulous production values left me cold. Mark Kermode (Film Critic BBC) was one of my contemporaries and he said: “You have to see everything so that when something comes along that is good you will really notice it.” Of course, this exacerbated the fatigue and often meant that we were too quick to judge, and after a while, very little appealed because we had set ourselves far too high a standard to be realistic about the film’s quality. If you look at the reviews in The Guardian, you will see more bad reviews that good. You might argue that a bad review is much better copy than a good review so there might be an editorial decision in there. To a certain extent Movie critics can be a poor parameter for quality and an injudicious contribution to its success or failure. After ten years of reviewing films, I knew it was time to stop. I wasn’t enjoying it and I was probably doing some disservice to the film industry. Less is so much more. Harry Stafford – The Manchester Film School """ And, perhaps Manohla Dargis and Peter Travers watch far more movies than they write reviews for.