Film Flam

A piece of cinephile criticism typically focuses on evaluation and appreciation. The ideal cinephile critic has wide and subtle tastes and tries to expose the distinctive qualities he or she finds in the film. Through the skillful use of language, the critic tries to convey the film’s unique identity and to summon up, by a kind of tonal mimicry, the effects that the film arouses. Here, for example, is Kent Jones on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye: “Is there another filmmaker since Warhol with a better sense of just hanging out? It’s about how time feels as it’s passing, about the feeling of simply existing, moving through life as most people do, no big deal, caught in a state of being itchy, nervously under the gun, pressured from outside to perform, to straighten up, to make a little money.”