I don't like the movies you like and it's not personal

The irreparable damage of "let people enjoy things"

I recently interacted with a tweet that said “Can we get people [at Cannes] who don’t hate movies[?]” This was in response to another tweet saying that Cannes attendees didn’t “deserve Cannes tickets or David Cronenberg movies” because a Letterboxd user did not like The Shrouds, David Cronenberg’s newest film that debuted this week at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. 

The Shrouds (2024, dir. David Cronenberg)

Cinephiles do plenty of mythologizing about Cannes due to its historic reputation in the film world. I’ll admit, I also participated in this mythologizing for years. But last year, I attended the 76th Cannes Film Festival and now I can’t mythologize it anymore. And not to sound ungrateful for the experience I had there, I would love to attend again in the future, but it’s just another film festival. 

Yes, Cannes attracts buzzy titles and stars to walk the red carpet and it is located in the French Riviera, but it’s an industry event. People are trying to sell their movies. Industry people and critics attend Cannes just like any other festival because it’s their job. And I assure you, these people do not hate movies. In fact, these people work in struggling industries for weird hours and weird pay because they love movies.

Seeing tweets from self-proclaimed “movie lovers” about the reactions to the new Coppola and Cronenberg movies inspired a question in me, what is a “movie lover”? Are people who didn’t like Megalopolis or The Shrouds meant to praise them just because the same directors made The Godfather and Videodrome? Surely a “movie lover” is not someone who blindly praises anything they watch just because something existed before it. 

To me, a “movie lover” is someone who truly loves the art form and is not shy to criticize, even obliterate, a movie when discussing it if that is their position. The push and pull between the artist and the critic is vital to any art form. This relationship thrusts the form forward. If we, as “movie lovers”, naively praise everything we see, what does it even mean to actually like something?

Admittedly, this is anecdotal and has no statistical basis, but I have seen this praise-heavy mindset rising in recent years. And I completely get it, to a certain extent. We are fans of movies, it is incredibly easy to fall in line and praise every film we see. Especially in such an awkward financial time for the industry, it feels like our duty to support not just with our money but also our opinions. But it’s precisely for the same reasons that I feel it is important to be incredibly critical about what we’re paying money to see. 

Someone disliking something you like feels like an indictment on your taste and interests when really all it is is a statement on the other person’s taste. When that person is a critic, someone who (probably) spends more time with the medium than you do and is a perceived voice of authority, that can hurt even worse because it can make us feel like the things we like are bad and our taste is bad and we might not be as smart as we think we are. But, as Esther Rosenfield asks in her Medium article about the infamous “Let People Enjoy Things” webcomic, “If you hold an opinion about a movie, why should reading an opposing one make you feel bad? [...The] notion that a negative review could make someone feel bad for liking a movie says less about the review than it does about the person reading it. It indicates to me that they want to like a movie and not think too deeply about why they like it, out of fear that introspection would lead to them not liking it anymore.”

It’s ok to like different things. It’s ok to dislike things. I would argue it’s incredibly important to have differing opinions. A monoculture is bland and gray.

The purpose of a critic has become so incredibly jumbled in this era of Rotten Tomatoes scores. We often perceive aggregated critic scores as a statement on the quality of a movie, and in some ways, it can be, but it’s not concrete. To me, a movie critic is much like a food critic. You have to find a critic whose taste complements yours. When you do that, a critic can help better guide what you might like and dislike. 

Personal example: IndieWire’s David Ehrlich is an objectively good critic, but not my go-to critic because based on what I think is good and what he thinks is good, our tastes are different. His reviews probably won’t guide me towards movies I will enjoy. That’s okay though, I still read a lot of his reviews, mainly because I just like reading reviews.

The growing antipathy to criticism, to being mean, is a net negative for any art form. The point of attending a film festival, especially as a critic, is not to gush about every movie you’re seeing. You have to look past the veil of “oh my god, I’m at Cannes!” that a “movie lover” might imagine comes with attending. At the end of the day, you’re sitting in a movie theater that looks like the majority of other theaters. You’ve got to treat the movie the same. We’ve got to start treating other people’s opinions less like an attack and start treating them like a conversation about the future of the art form.

Thank you to Sarah (her substack linked here) for the help editing this!