Today’s Movie Critic Is More About the Tomato than the Sauce

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position of authority over those who offer up their work — and their reputations — to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and even more fun to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than the criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

— Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Those last three sentences remain my North Star as a movie critic. The search for “the new” is why I keep watching, why I keep writing, and why I keep hoping. Consider me a friend of the new. If the new shows up and everyone else pretends not to recognize it, I’ll be the one introducing it around like it is family.

Yet being a critic today is not only about defending the new — it’s about defending the standards by which anything can still qualify as new.

Every Christmas break, there’s a scene at the kitchen counter where my brother-in-law teases me for my allegedly “low” three-star ratings of CODA, Sinners, or Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

He shakes his head and says, “Those movies were unbelievable! Why not give them four stars or higher?”

I jab back with the old David Spade/SNL quip: “I saw CODA when it was called Mr. Holland’s Opus; Sinners when it was called From Dusk Till Dawn; and Wake Up Dead Man when it was better as the original in the series.”

Call it smug or pretentious — I call it an occupational hazard. When you’ve seen enough films, repetition becomes visible; sometimes painfully so.

Which leads to the first requirement of being a movie critic: You don’t just have to watch a lot of movies — you have to watch the classics.

The classics broke the ground and laid the foundation on which every movie still builds today. Yet for every hundred so-called “movie critic” startup sites, there seem to be a hundred classics left unwatched.

Take the generational social media platform Letterboxd, for example. Letterboxd advertises itself as a global social network for grassroots film discussion and discovery, yet half of its Gen Z and Millennial users haven’t seen foundational staples like The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thieves, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Rear Window. These same users will hand out 4.5 stars to the CGI-saturated juggernaut Wicked, unaware that it is essentially fan fiction set in a cinematic universe they’ve never actually visited.

This brings us to the analogy that matters: Complimenting today’s spectacle without knowing yesterday’s foundation is like complimenting your roommate’s Ragu spaghetti without ever tasting your Italian grandma’s sauce. No context, no lineage, just unlimited tolerance for corn syrup as long as it’s pixelated. RottenTomatoes.com enables these lowered standards by pretty much “liking” everything too. Even fresh tomatoes can be pressed to watered-down complacency.

This is why my five-star ratings are rare. I reserve them for the groundbreakers — the pioneers, the originators, the firsts. The films that created the recipe. The films that didn’t have templates to copy because they were busy creating the templates everyone copies now. (I saw Joker after it completely plagiarized Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.)

And even amid the IP mines and franchise recycling plants of the 21st century, we’ve been gifted more true groundbreakers than one might expect:

David Lynch’s subconscious Rubik’s cube, Mulholland Drive (2001), taught an entire generation that narrative clarity is optional and interpretation is half the sport. The dreadfully endless superhero myth was recast as neo film noir in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), and nothing DC or MCU has managed to tear the cape since.

The animation of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) rediscovered the graphic page. City of God (2002) reinvented crime cinema. Parasite (2019) detonates the long-standing firewall between “art film” and “popular entertainment,” proving that class satire and tonal shifts can coexist fluidly.

I’d also like to include the recent audacious masterpiece, One Battle After Another (2025), which reframes the modern war film by discarding the traditional arc of victory, catharsis, or moral clarity and instead renders conflict as a perpetual psychological disease.

And, finally, as a passionate defender of the horror genre, I believe The Babadook (2014) sparked that legitimized metaphor-driven elevated horror we see in all its copycats today.

The point isn’t that these films are universally beloved — it’s that the medium moved because of them. They expanded cinematic vocabulary. They forced influence. They altered recipes. They deserve the five stars, not the “fresh” tomatoes RottenTomatoes hands out like candy.

Which brings us back to the kitchen counter.

My brother-in-law, who thinks I’m “too harsh” with my three-star ratings, has probably seen a couple of the films I mentioned above — enough to recognize good sauce, but not enough to know where the family recipe comes from. Meanwhile, he thinks I’m underrating the jarred stuff.

Enjoyment is not the enemy of criticism. Without the context of the classics, it’s easy to mistake banality for innovation. If you’ve never tasted Nonna’s sauce, you can’t insist the Ragu is a masterpiece.

And that, in 2026, is the quiet job of a critic: not to police taste, but to preserve context and remind audiences what cinema has already accomplished, so they can recognize what it still might.

Thank you for reading, let me know what you think, and Happy New Year!

Reely Bernie