By: Celine Sy
Pauline Kael, Leonard Martin and Roger Ebert are people who once had the power to make or break an actor’s career. They are among some of the most iconic film critics with the accolades to show. However, the landscape of film criticism has evolved into TikTok reviews, and rotten tomatoes fresh scale being what gets people to theatres.
Once tethered to newspapers, film criticism has broken free and been scattered to the winds. This means that even less people are going to look at their local newspapers, and it means the expense of keeping a film critic in the newsroom no longer makes sense.
Over the summer of 2025, film critic Michael Phillips revealed in an editorial that he was leaving the Chicago Tribune due to a newsroom reorganization.
He reflects on how when he first began writing reviews in the ‘80s,’ “The good fortune so many of us fell into back then, editing or generating arts coverage, is a dream now, a dream of a less precarious era of journalism,” he says.
Film critics can now write about anything they want and only focus on the kind of movies that interest them.
Film critic Dave Voigt who writes reviews on his website ‘In The Seats,’ talked about enjoying Marvel’s recent film, ‘The Fantastic Four’, but says “People aren’t necessarily coming to me for a review on that [the Fantastic Four]. They’re coming to me on something a bit more obscure. It’s like something like a foreign film or a documentary or that kind of thing.”
The barrier to entry for film criticism has lowered and now any movie-lover can go on TikTok, or YouTube, or Substack, or go on a podcast, and broadcast their opinion to the world. There is only one requirement for people to fill and that’s having a voice.
“If people go into the online space, setting up their own website or space and sort of come with a very distinct voice, then they have a chance to survive and they have a chance to thrive,”
– Dave Voigt.
But like with a lot of things on the internet, the situation is a mixed bag. Neil Sharpson, a film critic who publishes on his blog ‘Unshaved Mouse’, says that media democratization has led to more “witty, biting, well-crafted movie criticism.”
While also pointing out that it has produced plenty of bad criticism. Bad Criticism doesn’t interact with the material in good faith. It’s just trying to grab attention, operating on the idea that any publicity is good publicity. Sharpson called it, “cynical” and “rage-baiting.”
There is also criticism that is neither good nor bad. Instead, they’re just functional and the purpose is to tell readers if a movie is worth your time and money, which was the norm for a lot of newspaper film criticism before the internet.
Sharpson points out that critics like Roger Ebert were the exception to the rule, “Reviewers like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, who were writing fantastic works of movie criticism. But they kind of tended to be outliers,” he says. “Whereas most of the kind of the movie reviews I’ve read in print are quite functional. They’re more like, this is a good movie, you should watch it. This is a bad movie, you can probably skip it. They weren’t really kind of like great pieces of writing.”
Now to be fair to those old newspaper critics, telling people if a film is good or bad is what most people think a film review does. But that is an incredibly narrow idea of what a film review is or what a film critic is. Film criticism has always been more flexible than people realized.
In November 1988, a handful of viewers in Minnesota sat down to their Thanksgiving dinner and watched as a new TV show from an independent TV station aired. The show was called ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’, also known as MST3K. It followed comedian Joel Hodgson’s character Joel Robinson being forced to watch sci-fi B-movies of questionable quality in outer space with his only companions being two D.I.Y. robots.
MST3K’s commentary is not traditional film criticism, but it is still criticism. Underneath the sarcasm, there are insights about films that are also entertaining.
Now the people behind MST3K couldn’t have known how much their show would influence the coming online era. But spend some time watching an episode, and some things will quickly feel familiar.
Jack Benjamin from Indy Film Library, a website focusing on reviewing and writing about indie films. Benjamin wrote about MST3K’s influence on review culture writing.
“The show’s format will be familiar to many consumers of YouTube ‘reaction video’ culture, where, for better or worse, long-running shows like ‘Half in the Bag,’ ‘The Angry Video Game Nerd’ and ‘JonTron’ set up a scenario where they are forced to watch a movie they wanted to talk about anyway.” – Jack Benjamin
One person that Benjamin didn’t mention was Doug Walker, better known as the ‘Nostalgia Critic’ or ‘That Guy with the Glasses.’ Walker’s content followed a similar formula as MST3K and Sharpson talked about how in his early reviews he was influenced by Walker.
“It was very influenced by thatguywiththeglasses.com, which was a website around the early 2010s,” Walker says. “My blog was kind of like an attempt to do that, but just in text.”
According to Sharpson, some aspects of these types of reviews were storylines, memes, and running jokes. It was “This weird mishmash of film review and comedy,” he says.
But comedy shouldn’t surpass criticism, and the comedy can’t be the kind of comedy that punches down.
That just falls under bad criticism, both Voigt and Sharpson talked about trying to be fair and nuanced to the films they review. A film is made of a lot of moving parts. This is not an exhaustive list, but there is the script, filming, cinematography, direction, editing, CGI, costumes, and the music.
Each of those parts have people behind them and as Voigt points out, “You have to realize that there is not a filmmaker out there who intends to make a bad film.”
Of course, all the good intentions in the world aren’t enough to look past the fact that reviews are opinions at the end of the day. One critic can like a movie while another one might hate the same movie, and these divergent opinions can come from several factors that aren’t in the film’s control, like genre preference.
Now, a good critic would be able to explain or even just admit that they just don’t like a film. Besides, the greatest divide in opinion isn’t between critics, it is between critics and the general audience.
Just look at Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregate website where people and critics comment on movies. It’s not uncommon to see a film with a 35 per cent on the ‘Tomatometer’ AKA the critics, but an 80 per cent on the ‘Popcornmeter’ AKA everyone else.
When talking about this gap between critics and the audience, Voigt says “That’s what is really the struggle for the modern critic.”