What I Saw at the Movies
October 31, 2025 at 12:59AMIt’s easy to think that no one sees more movies than a film critic—though that also means you’ve never met Leo Robson, who as a teenager seemingly spent every free moment in a London cinema. (It’s also easy to think that 15-year-olds don’t care about Dogme 95, but the same exception applies.) For LRB, Robson uses his obsession to examine film criticism through the years, and to place the films of his awakening alongside those that led our most iconic critics to their most entrenched perspectives. It’s not popcorn fare, but it’s also very much popcorn fare.
My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, “when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.” Cavell, whose own “odd education” took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: “To be drowning in the material is really the only way – not to care too much what you’re seeing, to care a lot about what you think about what you’re seeing.” And I did care, filling exercise book after exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called “actual” sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: “I’m going to be a movie reviewer.” He was wrong.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/30/what-i-saw-at-the-movies/
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