Much of it had been obviated by the internet; its style was obsolete

the stark confrontational truculence of each makes them of the moment to me

I sat down next to him and said hello. He acknowledged me without speaking and soon the film began. The then prominent film critic had a notebook in his lap, but he remained immobile until a scene revealed that Winslet’s husband was an online porn addict. At that point the critic began furiously taking notes, scribbling with great force and speed. Since I had read his book, his vigorous jotting during that particular scene caught my attention. When his review came out, he called the movie, which was average and predictable, “extraordinary” and “startling.”

The cashier looked at the picture, then at me, then back to Welles in the magazine. She looked up again at my young, beardless face and my full head of black hair, which was clearly visible because I was not wearing a hat or a cape. “Is that you?” she asked, pointing at the photo.

“No!” I blurted out. “That’s Orson Welles!”

“Oh,” she said, scanning a can of pinto beans. I put the magazine back on the rack where I found it, gathered my grocery bags, and left through the automatic doors. Wow, I thought, that was a lesson in the artist-critic divide.

The next thing that had to go was the endless plot description that pads most film reviews. In the 21st century, film plots are known before the movies arrive in theaters. There are few points a critic has to make that need much plot description, but critic-journalists still put everything on the record like they are preserving it for a future in which we have no way to know what happened in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Seeing Godard’s Masculine Feminine at Wesleyan effected some change in me, on a cellular level. Contrary to its not being “the total film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live,” as Jean-Pierre Léaud explains in some narration Godard, I later learned, cribbed from Georges Perec’s novel Things, my high school friends and I, watching it twenty years after it was made with older college students and the few cinephiles there were in central Connecticut, really did feel like we had discovered a secret key to life. Everything about it had an immediate and visceral effect. The sound cuts, with their audible jumps within scenes, did something to my brain that changed me. Léaud’s subsequent narration in the film about his job as a pollster probably had more to do with my actual subsequent professional life than I would like to admit: “Do vacuum cleaners sell? Do you like cheese in tubes? Do you know there’s a war in Iraq on?”

What is now being celebrated, we’re told, is the system’s newfound commitment to greater inclusiveness. But there is a sharp distinction to be made between celebrating the appearance of new talent in filmmaking and celebrating the continued box office success of the blockbuster form itself. For moviegoers it is not always so easy to tell the difference, but every film executive understands it.

Criticism’s function is separate from that. “All that is required of the embattled critic as a test of his courage is that he never lose faith in his own judgment,” the film critic Andrew Sarris wrote in 1970. That kind of critical courage has waned in the age of the blockbuster. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s retirement from the Chicago Reader in 2008 left a vacuum in critical conscience that was filled by a strange, renewed interest in the opinions of the top critics at major media outlets, even as their opinions became more wishy-washy and noncommittal. No critic wants to get owned by Samuel L. Jackson on Twitter, like one did when the Avengers movie before last came out. It’s easier and safer for critics to embrace the style of feeble criticism that has emerged alongside the blockbusters they would prefer to avoid. For all the anger at critics, film criticism is very gentle these days.

And yet each week brings with it a new frustration with film critics. After Ocean’s 8 was met by reviewers with suggestions that it was less than perfect, Sandra Bullock, the film’s star and one of its producers, stated that this mild disapproval resulted from a lack of diversity among critics. American film criticism is not as diverse as it should be, but a different critical establishment would not have made Ocean’s 8 a good movie. And what did some grousing about it matter to the film’s box office? As of this writing, Ocean’s 8 has already quintupled its budget in ticket sales. What Bullock wanted was more deference from a profession already noted for its servility to movie stars.

When Rosenbaum was writing in 1995, a new world of cinephilia had to be created, and it waited to be ushered in via the internet. Today, serious film criticism operates in that world. Following the template established by Rosenbaum, it is fair-minded, open to films from all over the world made by all different kinds of people, and knowledgeable about classic cinema and the avant-garde. It seeks to rediscover forgotten films, it is supportive of micro-indies, and it strives to be polite and respectful. Trying to find the good in everything in this best of all possible subcultures, however, does little to improve an art form dominated by blockbusters and streaming television, especially when writing about those things dominates arts pages. At the same time, social media discourse around film fluctuates between too nice and too mean. The dearth of jobs in journalism, which has gotten worse year after year over the past two decades, had led to more and more film criticism being written for free on the web. Increasingly it is boiled down to tweeting, a form in which there is truly no upside but which commands the time and attention of many writers.

Part of what made this victory of perpetual blockbuster reanimation possible was the abandonment by most baby boomers of the film-critical cultural sphere, a flight that culminated in the publication of Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema” in the New York Times. Sontag claimed that both cinephilia and cinema were dead, an argument that now resembles the early 1990s “end of history” posited by Francis Fukuyama. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, as internet cinephilia began to rise, world cinema gave us, to name only a dozen, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, The Werckmeister Harmonies, In Vanda’s Room, Trouble Every Day, Khrustalyov, My Car!, Platform, The Piano Teacher, Kandahar, The Circle, Batang West Side, and Millennium Mambo. A serious, vital cinema of great originality, emotional depth, and beauty — the kind beloved by Sontag — was not in decline at all.

When I think about those three films by Béla Tarr, Aleksei German, and Lars von Trier existing in the same world as the endlessly optimistic franchise films that keep coming out, the constant replacement of one thing by another that is just the same, the repetitive cycle of festivals that critics somehow manage to jet to every year on the fairy dust of other people’s money, the Tarr-German-von Trier pessimism keeps me going. They are the antidote that restores life by nullifying entertainment.