Why Your Hot Take on Morbius Owes Everything to a Dead White Guy in a Bowtie
What do you think? Do we need professional critics in the age of TikTok reviews? Or is the "average fan" the only voice that matters now? Drop a comment below.
We live in the age of the “amateur critic.” Scroll through Twitter, Letterboxd, or TikTok for five minutes, and you’ll find a thousand hot takes. We all have a star-rating system built into our thumbs. for the love of movies the story of american film criticism
But have you ever stopped to wonder: Who decided that movies should be taken seriously in the first place?
Without critics like Kael and Sarris, we wouldn't have the vocabulary to argue about "cinematography" or "pacing" or "subtext." Without Ebert, we wouldn't have the empathy to sit through a slow foreign film. Why Your Hot Take on Morbius Owes Everything
The documentary ends on a bittersweet note. The old guard is gone (or dying out). The new guard is yelling into the algorithmic void. But the love remains. For the Love of Movies is not a slick Hollywood production. It’s a scrappy, passionate, slightly academic love letter. If you are the kind of person who stays for the credits, who watches the director’s commentary, or who has ever defended a Star Wars prequel at a party—you owe it to yourself to watch this.
Enter a few stubborn visionaries.
Suddenly, the amateur critic wasn't a voice of liberation. They were just... cheap labor for SEO. You might be thinking, "I don't need a critic to tell me if a movie is good. I have a 92% on the Tomatometer."