A great deal of bad film writing comes from a single collapsed distinction: the failure to separate this film did not work on me from this film does not work. They feel identical from the inside. Disliking something is a complete, vivid experience that arrives with the full force of a judgment, and it takes deliberate effort to notice that the experience is evidence about a meeting between a film and a person, not a measurement of the film.
Getting this right is not about being nice. It is about accuracy. A critic who cannot tell the two apart will misdiagnose films constantly, and will be least reliable exactly where readers need them most.
The test that mostly works
Here is the practical version. Ask: what is this film trying to do, and does it do it?
That question does two things at once. It forces you to identify the film’s actual project rather than the project you would have preferred, and it gives you a standard that is not your own taste. A film can execute its intentions with total competence and still leave you cold. That is a film that is not for you. A film can have intentions you love and fumble every one of them. That is a bad film, and you can be sad about it.
The word “mostly” is doing real work in that heading, because the test has limits and pretending otherwise is its own error. Two of them matter.
First, intentions are not always legible, and reconstructing them from the finished film risks circularity: you decide what the film was going for based on what it achieved, and then congratulate it for achieving it. Anything can be defended this way. A film that bores you was going for a hypnotic effect. A film with flat acting wanted alienation. This is how criticism turns into a machine for excusing.
Second, some intentions are not worth executing well. A film can be exactly the thing it set out to be and that thing can be contemptible or empty. “It achieved its goals” is not a full defense, and a critic is allowed to say that the goals were not worth achieving. But that is a separate argument that has to be made out loud, not smuggled in as a claim about competence.
Signs it is not for you
Some reliable indicators that what you are feeling is a mismatch rather than a defect.
- Your objection is to the premise. If the complaint is that the film is slow, and slowness is the entire aesthetic strategy, you are objecting to the film existing rather than to its execution.
- You are describing a genre convention as a flaw. Calling a musical unrealistic because people sing is the pure form of this. It happens in subtler versions constantly.
- People whose judgment you respect see something specific in it. Not popularity, which proves nothing. Specificity. If serious viewers can point to concrete things in the film that you did not register, the odds are good that something is there.
- You cannot describe what a better version would look like. If your fix for the film is that it should have been a different film, that is taste talking.
- You were in the wrong condition. Tired, distracted, wrong expectations, wrong room. Genuinely common and rarely admitted.
Signs it is actually bad
Craft failure is real and it can be pointed at.
- Internal incoherence. The film contradicts its own rules, its own characters, or its own tone in ways that are not doing anything.
- Stated but unearned. The film asserts things it never dramatizes. Characters describe each other’s qualities the film never shows. An emotional climax lands on a relationship that was never built.
- Technique that fights the material. Coverage that hides the geography, cutting that kills a performance’s rhythm, a score that instructs you to feel something the scene has not produced.
- Structural collapse. A film that spends an hour setting up questions and abandons them, or that resolves in a rush because it ran out of story.
- It does not work on its own audience. A comedy that does not get laughs from people who love that comedy. A horror film that does not frighten people who came to be frightened. This is close to the cleanest evidence available.
Notice that every item on this list can be argued about with reference to things in the film. That is the difference. Taste claims resolve to “I did not enjoy it.” Quality claims resolve to “look at this scene.”
Why the distinction is worth the trouble
It makes writing more useful. A review that says a film is dull tells a reader almost nothing, because the reader does not know whether they share your threshold. A review that says the film is deliberately unhurried, that the payoff is atmospheric rather than narrative, and that it did not land for this viewer tells them everything they need to decide for themselves. The second review is honest about disliking the film and still helps someone who might love it. That is the job.
It also makes the negative reviews land harder. If you have demonstrated that you can distinguish between films that failed and films that were not aimed at you, then when you say something is genuinely broken, it carries weight. Critics who call everything they dislike incompetent train their readers to discount them.
And it protects against the most embarrassing error in criticism, which is confidently dismissing something you simply were not equipped to read. This happens to everybody. The history of film writing is full of pieces where a critic met something outside their frame of reference and mistook their own confusion for a fault in the object.
The part where you are still allowed to hate things
None of this is an argument for a bloodless criticism where nobody commits to anything. Strong reactions are the raw material. A critic with no violent responses has nothing to write from, and pretending to a neutrality you do not have produces the flattest prose in the world.
The point is not to suppress the reaction. It is to say which one it is. “This is well made and I could not stand a minute of it” is a legitimate, interesting and honest thing to write, and often more revealing than a tidy positive review. So is “I wanted to love this and it is broken, here is where.”
What is not legitimate is the lazy fusion, where personal distaste gets dressed up in the language of objective failure because that sounds more authoritative. It is a small dishonesty, but it is corrosive, and readers can smell it.
Two questions, asked in order, will carry you a long way. What was this film trying to do? Did it do it? Then, separately and last: did I like it? Keeping the third question distinct from the first two is most of the discipline.
