Movies are America's biggest entertainment industry, its most significant popular art form, and its most brilliant cultural mirror. Film is also unique among art forms — and magical too — for possessing, at once, incredible heterogeneity (in that movies draw on, and combine, elements from all the other arts), and incredible immediacy (in that the way that movies combine these elements, at least in the best of cases, creates an organic unity which conquers the senses so utterly that the viewer feels transported — the lights go down, and suddenly everyone together in the theater, or on the couch, is sharing the same dream). Movies bring the whole culture that produced them to bear on the minds of all who watch them. They show us who we are, whether they do it by what they illuminate or what they fail to, and whether we like or dislike what we see.

These properties make movies extraordinarily powerful objects in the culture that are worth talking about, and this is why film criticism has been one of the most thrilling and incisive forms of nonfiction writing for the past 100 years. It's not only vital for the fact that the critic's is the only voice that stands between the viewer and the advertising (to paraphrase Pauline Kael), but exhilarating for the fact that, since movies are, collectively, about everything, the work of writing about them forces the critic to make contact with their thoughts and feelings about everything. That's the tradition I hope to operate in and contribute to.

The terms of both movie production and movie reception are positioned in fascinating and possibly pivotal moments in America right now: Hollywood, bruised after the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 and salivating over generative AI, appears to want to purge the human element from its product as much as possible, which seems an odd way to fulfill their dream of appealing to as many people at once as possible; meanwhile, the movie audience is harder to appeal to than ever before, having been divided bitterly along culture-war lines and predisposed to see everything in those terms. In the next ten years, we may see a new separation between the art dimension and the commercial dimension of movies, or we may see a renaissance that recalls the 1970s. We may even see both at once, at different economic levels.

My hope is to be here to bear witness to it all, and to shine a light on it by my own experience, one movie at a time.

Find my reviews in writing here: https://letterboxd.com/quillh/

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