reading less, comprehending little, expecting more: illiteracy and the movies.

scroll on any social media platform after a new movie release and you will get a firsthand look at the media illiteracy crisis – failure to grasp plot, failure to grasp story, failure to grasp perspectives, complaints about plot holes, requests for prequels and sequels to see and explain information much more satisfying when left unexplained. to be pondered and posited in our own minds.

what happens when we’re all reading less?

what happens to movies when we’re reading less?

what happens to how we talk about movies when we’re reading less?

these questions preoccupy me constantly as a regular reader and moviegoer, who reads and revisits random stories and sees and rewatches random movies with a practiced openness to investing in a story. waiting to be entertained and impressed versus weighing my personal expectations against what i’m shown onscreen.

as i see it, the general audience is growing more unfamiliar and more uncomfortable with fictional stories – reading them, engaging with them, investing in them, comprehending them, believing in them, valuing them. at the same time, there's an unspoken expectation that a person automatically gets better at analyzing stories in movies because they’re watching more movies. do i believe it’s possible for a person to get better at analyzing movies by watching movies? yes, as movies themselves are undoubtedly a medium worthy of study, possessing technical and narrative components working together to bring stories to us. what i do not believe is that you can learn to understand and analyze and appreciate stories solely through movies. movies tell stories, original and adapted, to be read like texts, but they did not invent storytelling. you need to read.

in his 1976 book of essays on watching movies and critiquing racial politics in american cinema, the devil finds work, james baldwin details his first experiences with film. his immediate reaction to turn to what he called “the cinema of my mind” — BOOKS. READING. STORIES (baldwin, 1976, p.9). baldwin turned to the tale of two cities and uncle tom’s cabin, reading voraciously. to help him learn what he was meant to learn from their words, and what he was meant to learn from these new moving images and sounds. to provide him with a foundation of story, of learning, references, perspectives, and curiosity. “they had something to tell me,” he writes. (baldwin, 1976, p.11)

i share this same curiosity for stories, arisen from and strengthened by reading fiction. baldwin’s fiction. and that of shakespeare and morrison and garcía marquez. kincaid and wright and cisneros. ryan and rochon and herrera, and and and. the opportunity to leave my world to learn about another. to experience life with a set of characters, their perspectives, their choices, their actions. it keeps me open to discovering new stories. keeps me from feeling the need to be in the driver’s seat as i watch movies. movies remind me of my love of reading and they build upon that love by reminding me to be a better audience member – more present, more engaged, more willing by reminding me that someone else’s art isn’t about me. reminding me to remove ego from my movie discourse; remove the desire for a movie to be bespoke to my one-person audience. to be what i would’ve come up with or have come up with in my own mind vs. what someone else has come up with in theirs.

but again, what happens when we’re collectively reading less?

what happens when the audience doesn’t know or appreciate the joy of getting lost in a book and doesn’t see or appreciate the similarities in getting lost in a movie?

what happens when the audience doesn’t understand perspective from books and therefore doesn’t consider perspective at all in movies?

what happens when an audience doesn’t know how to or care to empathize with characters? when they fail to connect with onscreen characters living lives dramatically different from or a bit too relatable to their own because they’re not reading stories?

in this piece, i attempt to address what happens. to tackle the myriad consequences of illiteracy and low reading comprehension and their effect on how we watch and discuss movies today, in an effort to encourage people to read and rebuild our collective curiosity for story. to implore the general audience to once again be open to wonder – to what movies will make you think and feel after you engage vs. doing all the wondering, all the thinking, all the feeling in advance (or not at all) and judging movies against that. to let filmmakers tell us their stories. to learn to cope with not being the permanent main character. to appreciate story. to turn to reading like baldwin did.

less engagement and familiarity with stories

small anxieties about experiencing a new story for the first time are to be expected. think about how you feel when someone recommends a movie that seems totally different than what you typically watch, or recommends a book by an author you’ve never read before. that “i don’t know – this sounds different and it’s making me slightly uncomfortable” feeling. experiencing new art and experiencing it more often exposes you to that feeling and asks you to push past it, to access story, to comprehend, and to feel more deeply. reading less means less knowledge of and comfort with stories in general (their rhythms, conventions, beats), and it means less pushing through those feelings, those anxieties about experiencing something new. regular readers tend to be more open to stories – of one type (a romance reader or a mystery reader) or many. they tend to know more stories. how they can be shaped, what’s satisfying vs. unsatisfying. regular readers have more literary references stored, helping them make better inferences and more easily spot connections. they tend to be more open to novelty in stories, whether it's within their genres of interest or outside of them. if you’re not often taking part in new experiences, and reading a new book counts as a new experience, novelty can cause anxiety, frustration, or rage – almost exactly what we’re seeing in conversations today surrounding media. people are anxious about consuming stories that they might not be able to relate to, so they don’t read new books. they don’t see new movies. or they do see new movies, and share increasingly harsh reactions to new or different or unexpected stories.

engaging with more stories helps you better cope with experiencing new stories – ones that work for you, ones that don’t, and all the ones that fall in between, and this engagement most often comes through the experience of reading. fiction, in particular, more than any other genre. as you read, you discover more about your interests – the stories you are drawn to, the characters you resonate with, as well as those you struggle to connect with, the topics and themes that grate your nerves or push you out of your comfort zone in ways you didn’t know you needed. you encounter new and changing interests, helping you build up comfort, adaptability, and flexibility with having contradictory or conflicting internal feelings. exposure to complicated worlds helps you realize and hopefully accept your own complexity and complications, and helps you better accept the complicated and complex worlds and characters we see in movies. along with increasing your familiarity with self-discovery, reading provides practice shifting worlds and perspectives and understanding the thought processes behind characters and their choices. reading also provides practice deciphering the differences between character choices, narrator choices, and author choices as well as information that characters, narrators, and readers know. conversations about movies today clearly reflect a discomfort with story, an inability and unwillingness to see perspectives and flaws, and a debilitating lack of comprehension and empathy. reading books addresses and improves every single one of these areas.

less reading comprehension

struggles with reading comprehension (and critical thinking) are of course the clearest consequences and reflections of the illiteracy crisis, and these struggles consistently show up in movie discourse.

to me, most plainly in the conflating of plot and story. while “plot” and “story” might sound like synonyms and are much more tightly linked in books, their differences in film are distinct –  PLOT being the main sequence of events, whereas STORY is what actually happens to characters from beginning to end. for example, in JURASSIC PARK (1993), the plot is gathering experts together to tour an island park populated by dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA after being assured the park is safe by its billionaire owner. a series of events leads to the dinosaurs’ release into the park, and the former tour becomes a fight for survival. however, the story changes depending on the character. for park owner john hammond, his story is learning that he cannot control the overwhelming power of nature, even as a means of showcasing its wonder and beauty to the world. paleontologist alan grant’s story is shifting from being hyper-focused on his career and averse to children to being a capable and willing protector and father figure to lex and tim. same plot, different stories.

PLOT is also the sequence of events how they’re presented onscreen, whereas story is always in chronological order. OPPENHEIMER (2023) provides a solid example of this – because of writer-director christopher nolan’s signature use of nonlinear storytelling, the film’s plot has a great deal of momentum, moving backward and forward in time in oppenheimer’s life. this movement gives weight to the underlying chronological story: a conflicted and haunted man exploring and reckoning with the consequences of his choices and infamous creation. BARBIE (2023) is a character study of its own, with both plot and story running in a linear fashion. the film’s plot is barbie venturing outside of her perfect world to experience the real world, learning the beauty and dangers of living amongst human beings. the story though, is a model of oblivious perfection experiencing a sudden existential crisis that leads to her embracing imperfection and self-awareness.

we know plots – narrative structures, conventions, tropes, from books and movies.

and we know stories – character, choices, conflict, context.

well…we did.

readers still do. readers who think critically still do.

however, more often that not, stories appear to be going way over people’s heads, in ways that not only demonstrate lack of comprehension but more alarmingly, lack of awareness of a story altogether. little acknowledgement of or ability to see or understand character arcs. a cursory glance at movie reviews and critiques today will show you far too many quippy plot summaries and cynical cliffsnotes with ratings. and we see the demands for plot increasing daily. there appears to be an insatiable thirst for plot details, for hyper-specific information and extremely bespoke personal requests, typically via incessant questions or comments across social media platforms, coming from the general audience sent directly to the creators behind upcoming films. the same audience then wants filmmakers to take the exact information they’ve inundated them with and present it in the exact form they’ve also inundated them with, from casting all the way down. character arcs be damned. and, they somehow also want to be utterly surprised and captivated by said presentation, which they’ve already constructed in their brains and obsessed over.

instead of people reading more stories and wanting to be told more stories, they’re dreaming up their own and judging movies against these dreams. creating their own plots and characters versus immersing themselves in the stories being told to them. crying out for one-to-one representations of the movies in their minds to be created by other people. never fully investing in the stories they receive because they're not the plots they would have crafted.

if you don’t engage with stories, you aren’t necessarily compelled to look for them in movies. you’re compelled to look for plot. stuff that happens. a series of events expressed through a collection of images. you’re not drawn to being invested or wanting to invest in a story. what’s worse is that people now seem to be completely put off by story. it’s too unnecessary, too deep, makes you think too much, instead of simply allowing you to be “entertained.” and while it’s true we’ve all experienced films that feel like taking medicine, films where there’s a bit too much story and not enough entertainment; lately, it seems like any effort needed to comprehend story or empathize is too much for movie watchers. any effort needed to CARE.

nihilism has made it to the movies.

they’re too relatable, too unrelatable, too much like real life, not enough like real life. a flawed character they might relate to too much; an interaction that they cannot relate to personally. there’s a reticence to story that makes studio heads and their macro concerns seem far more significant to the moviegoing and movie-watching audience than any story being told onscreen. people are avoiding buying into the experience, but movies require that buy-in.

movies require participation via presence, attention, and focus, to witness an unfolding of events (PLOT) and the significance of those events (STORY). in any genre. if you’re watching a romcom, it’s not just about the presence of a love story and comedy. it’s not just about the plot. what’s the story? what character arcs did each of the love interests have? does the happily ever after feel fulfilling and believable? what could the story be telling us about how the filmmaker(s) feel about love? about the world? it’s not just what happened. it’s “why do we care what happened?” and as we go further into film analysis, we interrogate the collaboration between the narrative and the technical that either helped us or prevented us from comprehending and connecting with the story. questions like: was the film successful in communicating spoken and unspoken information to me? how do i know this? how are the technical aspects of the film helping me understand what the filmmaker is trying to say?

we need to be able to move past the what and get to the “so what?” – the questions and conversations that really matter vs. responding to “i didn’t get what happened” over and over again. we have to train our brains to find a middle ground by immersing ourselves with stories. by reading fiction to practice parsing out themes and perspectives and arcs. why? because guess who also reads? screenwriters. directors, actors, talented people in casts and crews read books, use books, reference reading materials. and as an audience member, if you’re not reading, if you’re not regularly engaging with stories, you don’t know story. not the way you need to in order to participate in worthwhile conversations about movies. too many people think they’re talking about character and choices, when they’re talking about plot, failing to recognize story, and demonstrating an inability to comprehend the information shared and how it was shared. an inability to comprehend in general.

And as lack of comprehension mounts, so do the “plot hole” and “bad writing” refrains. people cannot understand and therefore reflexively blame movies for being created and written in ways that are unable to be understood. does bad writing exist? of course. it’s always existed. in movies, we’re in contact with so-so screenplays often, however, every problem that you have with a film, every little thing you don’t like, cannot be reduced to or blamed on the script or plot. especially if significant segments of the audience are able to comprehend the story with no problems. an actor who plays a brief role and does not return is not immediately a plot hole. a character making a decision you don’t like is not immediately bad writing. in fact, this commentary often reflects a struggle to accept unexplained or uncomfortable information as well as comprehend explained information. a technical or story decision you don’t like doesn’t necessarily mean it is not in service to the overall story. frustratingly, if or when you attempt to explain the function of the contested decision to the story, people stand firm – solely seeing it as part of a plot, as something that has happened simply because the screenplay says so or for “shock value”, and not to serve the story being told. they believe plot and story are one and the same.

the concept of a movie seems to be getting away from people. yes, we’re here for entertainment, but we’re primarily here for a story. expectation or consideration of a story is decreasing, leading people to conclude there is nothing to comprehend or attempt to comprehend, which couldn’t be further from the truth. one could presumably watch CASINO (1995), simply enjoy the nearly decade-long snapshot into the lives of casino executives and the mafia in vegas, and go on about their day without a second thought beyond entertainment. but, what about sam’s journey? nicky’s beginning middle and end? ginger’s arc? these are as much of the movie as the maximalism and brutality and money. if a person leaves the movie not acknowledging the character journeys, they’ve categorically missed something. i would argue they’ve missed the movie altogether. and more and more people are missing something, missing nearly everything, in the movies they watch.

it’s only more reading, more comprehension, and more critical thinking – not for the sole purpose of criticism, but critique and curiosity – that will allow us to once again have more frequent and fruitful film conversations. asking questions of stories and extending them to movies. why was this information shared? who shared it? how was it shared? if you don’t like a particular choice, can you say why it didn’t work for you? does it work with any other aspects of the film? does it make sense in the world of the film? does it feel like solely a stylistic choice by the creators involved? does it feel accidental or haphazard?

in the absence of asking these questions or being able to comprehend what’s being communicated onscreen, people not only want but need everything in a movie to be explained to them in the least uncomfortable way possible. they want every single frame of a movie to define the whole movie or the whole protagonist – no wrong moves, no awkwardness, no conflict, no tension. not only is this nonsensical but also unsustainable. a movie is more than a basic sum of its parts and it is definitely more than a collection of shots. all of the technical and narrative pieces are meant to inform collectively. all of the information you’re seeing is meant to inform collaboratively, coming together to tell you a story.

if you’re great at watching movies and you’re able to analyze and evaluate what is and isn’t working for you as you’re watching a movie for the first time without losing focus on the central story, go right ahead. but i’ll be honest: most people cannot do that. most don’t know to do that and shouldn't do that, and lately, far too many people think they do and that they need to, when they could just be watching and comprehending a movie. without comprehension and critical thinking, it’s as though people are in search of something to do while watching. something more than being present, which feels too passive. they need to force action to keep themselves entertained. prepping notes for a review or quippy social media posts while watching. preparing to nitpick plot. all the while, missing the STORY. and i would be remiss if i didn’t note that praising inferior or uninteresting plots solely because of things like tone, style, and music is also making people miss story.

movie criticism lately is too many missing the forest for the trees or missing the point altogether –

“this has way too many plot holes” or “y’all just don’t get it”.

too detailed or too broad.

never discussing story.

with people reading less, we see more intense focus placed on grasping the plot, the basic facts of a film (see: the rise in “ending explained” videos for seemingly every movie), and we experience considerable difficulty progressing to questions that examine the story, questions that use critical thinking to help us understand why or how things happen as well as why we should care about them. movies do more than show us what happened. they create opportunities to explore and explain the hows and whys.

struggles to comprehend are evident particularly when audiences are confronted with decisions they do not like or believe they personally would not make – decisions made by directors and writers. characters too. movie watchers heaping criticism because they find a particular character's actions incongruous with their personality despite information clearly shared during the movie about the character’s background, personality, and decisions that would lead them to act in the exact way shown on screen.

if you’re reading, if your expectation is approaching stories analytically, the discussion of plot happens as part of analyzing the execution of the story; however, we can hardly touch on the story in greater depth because movie fans are increasingly unequipped and disinterested in discussing it. it’s nearly impossible to progress to themes and analysis. when plots are stumping general audiences, how can we get to analyzing story?

by far the most upsetting development to me is that movies are rapidly responding to the growing audience’s lack of familiarity with stories and lack of comprehension by flattening themselves. making themselves more simple, more prescriptive, more one-dimensional to maintain the interest and attention of those who need an uncomplicated plot, who aren’t clamoring to understand the hows and whys, despite more fulfilling stories being the ones to stick with us for days and decades. plots with explosions and drawn out explanations but little to no believable conflict, learnings, or arcs. we need to read more to bring us back from that precipice. to demand interesting people and places and things onscreen beyond looking cool. not of creators, of studios. of the folks with the money. allow filmmakers and their teams to largely ignore us and create. make what’s meaningful to them. we know the euphoria of experiencing a completely unexpected mindblowing story in a movie, and receiving the images we beg and plead for doesn’t feel the same. it doesn’t compare. we need to be open and excited about the unexpected. hedging against the sublime by settling for dull satisfaction is not the way to engage with movies.

less awareness of POV and perspective

like plot and story, POV and perspective sound similar, but function differently in books and movies. in fiction, the differences are more distinct – where point of view establishes the relationship between the narrator, the reader, and the events of the story, while perspective is a character’s worldview (how they perceive the world around them based on their background, experiences, and beliefs). POV is who sees the world and who is telling the story. perspective is how they see it and how they tell it.

in film, POV and perspective are a bit blended, making it more difficult and more important to discern who’s creating the world, who’s showing us the world, who’s living in the world, and what all of these different individuals believe. for example, in first- person POV, the camera is in the place of the character’s eyes. we’re literally seeing the world through their eyes. at the same time, we’re also seeing the world through the director’s eyes because they’ve created the world (through production design, sound design, etc.). now imagine another version of the same series of events, seen through the eyes of an offscreen narrator. even with this change in POV and perspective, we can still glean both how the character sees the world and how the director sees the world. that sounds confusing. it is confusing. noticing and parsing out POV and perspective in film is hard work, but it’s necessary work because we need to know what movies are saying. what they are communicating to us and how. through their creators, stories, characters, and choices.

if you’re not consistently exposed to stories through reading – allowing yourself to sit in the passenger seat as a completely separate author tells you a story – it can be difficult to distinguish and comprehend POVs and perspectives of characters and creators. what a character believes and what an author believes are not necessarily the same thing. creators do not always use their protagonists or antagonists to express or display their point of view. this is also true of filmmakers. if you struggle to decipher POV and perspective, you struggle to understand story and struggle to understand films.

without familiarity with fiction, you become used to the stories you tell yourself – you as author, protagonist, and peripheral characters. because this instead of reading is your practice, as you watch movies, you’re likely to instinctively insert yourself, your POV, and your perspective as those of all of the characters, making it difficult to understand their thought processes because they aren’t you, or their decisions because they don’t seem consistent with decisions you would make. not on any day, but on your best day. because you fail to see the world as someone else might, or process the world as someone else might, even temporarily, the world established in a movie, all its characters, and all its events must be relatable to you in order for you to understand it. movies don’t work like that. we’re the audience.

when we’re watching a movie, we’re not telling the story. it’s important for us to know who we’re following, what they see and how they see it, what they believe, and how we can discern what a filmmaker believes. for us to engage in critical thinking.

in FIGHT CLUB (1999) and EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022), we follow our protagonists (the narrator and evelyn quan wang respectively), receiving information as they receive it, seeing a chaotic world as they see it, largely through the eyes of an offscreen “narrator” and first-person POV shots. in OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001), we’re in on the heist with danny ocean and his team, but we’re primarily following danny, learning about his thought processes and intentions and relationships. we get access to more story vs. plot and more perspective following danny. In INSIDE MAN (2006), we’re again in on the heist, to a lesser degree, but also slowly being clued into the real story through breadcrumbs from another character’s totally separate investigation. we get access to more story and plot and different perspectives.

POV and perspective work hand-in-hand to help us understand the world we occupy in each film. and more than the POVs and perspectives of their characters, films provide us with the POVs and perspectives of filmmakers. let’s take these same 4 films – what can we learn about how the filmmakers feel about the world based on their movies? what can we learn about their thoughts on masculinity, nihilism and absurdism, relationships, the definition of crime?

in addition to characters and screenplay, filmmakers can and do use tone to share their POV and perspective. cinematography, music, production design, and more can tell us a great deal about who has constructed a film. the same city can look very different through the eyes of different filmmakers; the same plot can showcase completely different stories based on the filmmakers who create them. reading provides you with an opportunity to better understand how the topics that preoccupy an author can show up in the stories they tell. it helps you get more comfortable and intrigued about how filmmakers tell stories. how filmmakers help us understand what’s important to them, their characters, and the worlds in which they inhabit.

less empathy

the rise of cynicism and nihilism has merged with illiteracy to suck empathy out of movie watching and movie criticism. caring and feeling in general are seen as cringe, and i hear the cringe only increases when we care about characters. when we care about their stories. about their feelings. about how they make us feel.

if you are not someone who easily empathizes with people or finds it cringey to empathize with characters, i don’t believe movies are the best pathway to increasing empathy. watching movies and relating to characters can be one of the methods, but not the primary method. reading fiction helps you understand POV and perspective – how someone tells their story, how they see the world – allowing you to relate to and connect with their humanity, emotions, or actions, and build empathy. the practice of getting lost in a book, handing yourself over to an author’s story with no images, forces your brain to intentionally opt in to characters and stories – to invest, or to not (because i’m absolutely an advocate of walking away from a fictional novel when it stops being interesting to you). you read as practice, as skill-building. watching a movie then leverages the skills you’re building through reading. the relationship between reading and movies is cyclical and symbiotic. learning and growing, learning and growing. learning stories and growing more comfortable with stories. it’s unsurprising that fiction readers tend to be stronger movie watchers – they’re used to stories, they’re used to opting into stories, to investing in and understanding POV and perspective and character development, to empathizing.

failure to empathize prevents people from understanding the story being told within a film, from finding some way to connect with the story and its characters. and lately lack of empathy shows up in movie watchers’ inability to accept or relate to flawed characters, not on a deeply personal level, but on any level.

not “i can’t relate”, but “i don’t want to relate.”

reactions to SUPERMAN (2025) include watchers being turned off by clark kent reacting to social media rage-baiting the way a “normal” person would despite our knowledge that he was raised on planet earth like a “normal” person, and expressing intense frustration at lois lane’s pointed questioning of superman despite our knowledge that she’s a pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist. some say we don’t even need these interactions because of the tension and the messy feelings. we don’t need the conflict or complexity that they introduce because who would have these emotions? who would say the wrong thing? whose ego would be bruised? – “i wouldn’t do that!” or “why are they reacting like we would?!” when i hear comments like these, i hear the avoidance of story by cutting off empathy. denying character development of any kind by cutting off empathy. criticizing character behaviors and decision-making at a level that makes me question whether people comprehend story or think it’s relevant. if you did, how could you treat the intentionality of film as cursory? as though movies just come together however they want and aren’t constructed with a purpose of telling a story? how could a small or significant scene be removed with no consequences to the overall story? 

people do not want to be forced to empathize with fellow human beings in real life and it has extended to onscreen characters. you don’t have to empathize with every character, but you have to have access to a scale of empathy in order to invest in story. to be comfortable with the awkward, incorrect, frustrating, and downright stupid decisions that characters make because humans too make them. we make them.

this cutting off of empathy for “normal” characters is somehow also complemented by an increase in empathy for villains. established villains. irredeemable villains. the characters seen as off-putting and cringey are the regular people, generally good people making good, potentially less than ideal, or sometimes downright bad life choices, while characters with no regard for human life are seen as flawed and relatable. i find this particularly concerning because these beliefs about characters show up in real life. disgust at regular people trying to live regular lives coupled with an adoration and appreciation for the uber-wealthy who praise power above all else. relating to real villains as role models, as worthy of empathy while they actively destroy the world around them with no remorse.

whatever empathy scale we’re currently using needs to be recalibrated. through reading, we can rebuild empathy for characters and their stories, and extend this to the movies we watch.

less seeking out and experiencing new, different, and original stories

due to the recent popularity of original films like SINNERS (2025) unexpectedly bringing moviegoers out to theaters in droves, general audiences are loudly expressing their disdain for remakes and adaptations – calling for more original stories in today’s movies.

there’s one problem: there are original stories in today’s movies. not as many as we need, and not nearly enough from the marginalized groups we so desperately need to hear from and about, but there are original stories in film every year waiting to be noticed. waiting to be appreciated. and there’s another problem: it’s basically impossible to predict the original stories that will gain popularity. it’s impossible to predict the stories that will stick.

audiences know this, and ticket sales and streams reflect it – people are actively seeing the very remakes and adaptations they grumble about. so much so they’re consistently the highest grossing films of the year. even with their complaints, people behave like creatures of habit. gravitating towards the comfortable, to what they know, to what feels familiar. characters they’ve heard of in locations they’ve seen before. experiencing “that was okay” again and again as the credits roll, because the risk of trying something new feels too unknown and anxiety-inducing.

the lack of familiarity with stories increases the pressure for each movie you see to be incredible vs. just a story that you have the opportunity to experience for a few hours. it increases anxieties around trying out new stories and giving yourself over to a movie in hopes of being blown away. reading fiction helps to curb these expectations for film by providing us with more stories, more perspectives, more and different examples of lives lived. receiving and accepting the novelty we crave in film can be frightening without practice – reading fiction and watching more movies, that cyclical, symbiotic relationship, is the practice.

what’s next for movie critique? i don’t know. all i have is a plea to read more. read fiction. get curious about story. constantly seek story. care about it, ask questions about it, and think critically about it. demand more and new stories from studios, because we need more access to POVs and perspectives that are not our own. recognize creators as people, real people with stories to tell and let them tell those stories. in the meantime? read the stories the world has to offer. take a look – it’s in a book.