Critics

The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it did sound as if it had all the makings of an entertaining and nicely savage little film. But through a surfeit of plot, it rather loses the plot, and the result is a surprisingly bland melodrama with the small-screen feel of one of those Agatha Christies the BBC forces upon us every Christmas. When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we critics go through? It’s a pity, as critics don’t often make it on to the cinema screen, unlike war reporters. War reporters, war reporters, why is it always war reporters when I have to sit through a film each week that may be boring? When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we go through?

As a film critic and historian who's written for Sight and Sound since 2011, I like to think that the greatest films of all time are always on my mind, but, in truth, they were particularly on my mind last summer. Last July, I received the official word that I was among the select group of critics picked to partake the Sight and Sound critics' poll to decide the greatest films ever made; a survey the British magazine first convened in 1952 and has repeated on a once-per-decade basis ever since. In the weeks before my deadline to vote, I meditated on what constituted a great film with unusual intensity and self-reflection.