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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9634336" data-attributes="member: 18">What's your basis for this claim?As far as I knew, which includes knowing actual human beings who have been actual critics for actual major UK newspapers, and more than one of them, note, it wasn't generally true historically, and still isn't true in a lot of cases. I can see it might happen with local papers, especially really small-time ones, but I don't think it's usually the case with larger publications.What has happened, particularly over the last 5-10 years is that journalism as a whole has been massively devalued, so critics are less likely to be veterans etc. - but I still don't think most major outlets have yet got to assigning randos to the role.Both of which are significantly more likely to be written by people who do, actually, qualify as experts, which makes your claim rather surprising.I think you're making assumptions without much of a basis. Someone is an expert because they know a lot, but you seem to be dismissing that as meaningless and unworthy of acknowledgement. I mean, that's absolutely standard in 2025, but that doesn't mean it's a helpful or informed attitude.The blinders thing seems completely baseless to me. What evidence do you have for it? Disagreeing about quality doesn't show blinders at all, you'd literally be wrong to claim that. If a movie critic was saying "audiences will hate this!!!", but audiences love it, sure, that's them being wrong and maybe having blinders.But you seem to think that happens with actually-expert critics, and my experience is that, generally, it does not. It happens more often with the unexpert critics, who think they're "men of the people" and the like, and let their personal reaction dominate. Someone like Pauline Kael might be an enormous jerk, and might focus on elements of films you don't care about, but historically she's still usually been right about what movies she thinks will be popular with general audiences. But she was paid to express HER opinion of the film, not play Nostradamus re: whether it will be successful. That's still the case with most critics.This seems like a weird thing to bring up to me. Who on earth is talking about "validity" except you? It seems to me that some people have weird insecurities where they get upset if critics have different opinions to them, but instead of talking about the opinions, they just start talking about "validity" and other irrelevant stuff. Why do that?I mean, like if you disagree with a critic, disagree with them on an actual basis, don't get into "validity" contests. Don't appeal to imaginary "common man" audiences who you actually are probably worse at assessing than most expert critics are.But what makes various randos better at reading/understanding "emotional impact" than expert critics, and why, for you is "emotional impact" given such primacy? Why is it more important than anything else? Especially this is interesting in the context that many movies have a very fleeting "emotional impact", but others do not, but that's rarely accounted for when this is brought up. Why aren't other aspects of a movie, like what it makes you think about, what ideas it conveys, and so on, important?</blockquote>

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