After 38 years and more than 10,000 movies, a film critic says goodbye

By Paul Byrnes

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As this is my last piece as a film critic for this newspaper, I am looking forward to some sunlight. I have spent much of the last 38 years in the dark. Some of my readers would agree. I can’t guess how many films I’ve seen, but certainly more than 10,000. For some people, reviewing movies is their dream job; others wonder how I could stand it. For me, it was like being Toto in The Wizard of Oz. I wasn’t always sure of what was going on but Dorothy, look at the Technicolor!

I was 27 when I started writing about movies. I had been nine years at the Herald, joining as a cadet from high school in 1976. I had not expected to specialise in film. I had been a “real” journalist, working in police rounds, courts, politics, industrial rounds, with postings in Melbourne and Brisbane and two years as the Herald correspondent in Papua New Guinea. I loved everything about newspapers and still do.

Paul Byrnes in 1992: Write like your opinion matters, even if it doesn’t.Credit: Sage

Like many colleagues, I developed Repetitive Strain Injury when desktop computers came in. The editor Eric Beecher, knowing I was interested in theatre and film, suggested I try film reviewing. That meant I could work offline, with pencil and paper. I ended up falling into the job by being in the right place at the right time with the wrong injury.

I was not qualified for the job, but such was the way of newspapers in the last century. I was prepared in one sense: I had read a lot of Pauline Kael, the much-loved, often controversial reviewer for The New Yorker. I learned what I know from her. In the game, those influenced by her are called “Paulettes”. I am happy to wear the label. Kael would throw her heart and soul into the response to a film. She was never dull and she always worked harder than her readers. She said once that if her readers could think of it themselves, they wouldn’t need her. Wise woman.

My first review appeared in this newspaper in April 1985. It was Another Time, Another Place, with Phyllis Logan, directed by Mike Radford. All I can say about it is that I got better. I soon realised that the job was not to tell people whether they would like a film: how would I know? Never trust a reviewer who says, “Go see it, you’ll love it.” What I tried to do was tell the reader how I felt about it, as honestly as I could. The word “I” is generally avoided in newspaper work but it is essential if you are writing about a medium in which emotional impact is the currency. I learned to write about what I saw and how I responded. I learned to report on myself, as well as the film. When I reviewed the first Nightmare on Elm Street, I wrote about how the terror ripped through my whole body. I was anything but objective. I learned to leave out most of the plot because readers hate too much story. The reader will judge whether they are interested in the film; that wasn’t my job. A good critic is someone you can read whether or not you want to see the film.

Of course, this works best when your responses are strong. Readers don’t want wishy-washy. They want forthright opinions, expressed in clear and entertaining prose. It doesn’t really matter what that opinion is, but it does matter how you write about it. The reader will know if you pull your punches. There’s a rude saying about opinions, that everyone has one, like a certain body part. That’s true, but you can’t write with that body part. Your opinion has to be cogent and independent. You have to write like your opinion matters, even if it doesn’t. You have to be persuasive about the differences between shit and shinola.

Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson in Almost Famous: a great film with good advice for critics.

In Almost Famous, a film I love, the Lester Bangs character gives good advice to the young rock critic: “Be honest and unmerciful”. You need a sharp set of tools, by which I mean an aesthetic framework, and you cannot be friends with the filmmakers. They have a right only to the same brutal honesty. That said, you must also be flexible. I learned more from the films I did not understand than the ones I did. The great ones always have something mysterious.

It doesn’t matter if the reader agrees with you. I’ll tell you a secret: even I don’t always agree with me. When I reread something, I see my younger self, struggling to work out my position on life, the universe and everything. I know I got it wrong many times. I didn’t like much of the output of the Coen brothers at first. They were too arch, too smarty-pants, too patronising of their own culture. Now I can’t get enough of films like The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Are Thou? And to be clear, there is no such thing as a right view.

In 2007 Paul Byrnes was awarded the Pascall Prize for Film Critic of The Year. Credit: Robert Pearce

It follows that you can’t run with the pack. The most popular films are rarely the best films. If you try to please a group of readers – let us say, those under 30 who love gaming – you will betray your own principles if you go soft on a film you despise. Most of the superhero “franchises” fall into that category for me. I have argued for some years that Hollywood has lost its way by chasing the kind of profits that only a few blockbusters can deliver. The small well-made film has disappeared – or it had, until Netflix came along. The major studios are not in the shinola business. What baffles me is how well they have convinced the worldwide audience that BIG, LOUD AND STUPID is worth paying for.

So one definition of what I have done for the last 38 years is to see a lot of bad films so you didn’t have to – but that’s not quite true. The big movies are like the Death Star – impervious to one plucky X-wing fighter like me. They were fun to write about, because the style and polish of blockbusters evolves like an amoeba, but James Cameron never needed my advice. I keep wondering if AI might actually improve the quality of movies. It’s a brave new area to write about.

My reviews of 10 great movies from the last 20 years

Drive My Car: “At any one time, the number of filmmakers who believe deep in their bones that film is capable of producing great art, and who go for it, is small. So when one comes along, we’re entitled to get excited. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, take a bow.” (2022)

Gulpilil: “This one had me at the first shot. David Gulpilil…walks down a country road… Then we see why: he’s following an emu, which was obscured by his body. When the actor stops and turns back up the road, the emu does too. They move in step, as if in a duet. He just smiles, as if to say ‘of course we are’.” (2021)

Corpus Christi: “The story of a troubled young man who pretends to be a priest in an isolated region of Poland… This one plays out like a western – a stranger comes to town, transforming the moral landscape. It’s Shane, with more vodka and fewer horses. It’s as Polish as a cabbage roll, yet startlingly universal.” (2020)

Spotlight: “It’s about how a newspaper, The Boston Globe, had the guts to go after the Catholic Church in a town full of Catholics, knowing that their own heavily Catholic readership would not like it. It’s about the way the Catholic Church… tried to conceal the knowledge that almost 250 of its priests were implicated in child sexual abuse…” (2016)

Son of Saul: “One of the greatest films ever made. Just when it seemed that cinema was spent, incapable of reinvention, lost in trivia and meaningless sensory stimulation, Laszlo Nemes has revived it by tackling the hardest story anyone could tell, in a way that has never been done – and in his first film.” (2016)

Leviathan: “One of the best films of the last ten or even 20 years. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev returns a sense of majesty to the screen with this story of a man who decides to stand up against a corrupt bureaucrat in a seaside town in northern Russia.” (2015)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “These spies are a different kind of creature, but Alfredson is able to look at them with clarity and the same kind of ruthless honesty that spies are supposed to value. It’s a brilliant film about the way an organisation, wracked with office politics, can destroy itself.” (2012)

Winter’s Bone: “Most of the film’s characters are involved in criminal activity. They’re hard-faced, dirt-poor and some are meaner than a junkyard dog, yet the film never loses sight of their humanity. It’s an unflinching picture of a part of America that’s forsaken and forgotten; what it ain’t is for sale.” (2010)

As it is in Heaven: “This is one of the best things to come out of Sweden since Abba – a completely charming, disarmingly frank, robustly opinionated and sweetly tuneful film about a small-town choir, a famous conductor, and the redemptive power of singing.” (2006)

Mystic River: “It’s as if Eastwood’s taciturn cowboy persona has become a directing style. His old-fashioned American rectitude mocks the way most studio movies are now made: he’s old school and getting more so. Mystic River is a lesson in visual probity.” (2003)

It may also be true that movies have lost some of their place in our lives. When I was young, it was hard to see the great films. You had to go to film festivals, join a film society and watch a lot of the old stuff presented by Bill Collins and David Stratton (bless ’em both). After thousands of hours, you might call yourself a cineaste and that was a cool thing to be. There are still those who do that, but the parade’s gone by – at least on the big screen. I do love what the streaming services have done, reviving the concept of adult drama, but even there, the vision is narrow. Almost no-one caters for classics and if you don’t tackle the classics – just as in literature and music – you’ll never know how good a medium can be. Yes, some movies of John Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Federico Fellini are available on the internet. It is also true that the cinema, the most powerful medium ever invented for communication of human emotion, has forsaken that role by concentrating on films that grab you by the seat of the pants rather than the heart or the head. A film like Dune was a dispiriting encapsulation of that failure. Millions adored it. I saw more evidence of the slow death of the medium.

That’s one of the reasons I am resigning. No one wants to hear that it was better 50 years ago, even if it was. And when you write from the feeling that the best is behind you, it’s time to stop. I still love movies and I always loved writing about them. Beautiful, passionate films are still being made, but you’re more likely to see them at home. And it’s harder to find critical voices you can trust. The number of new voices on the internet is vast. Some are terrific writers, but very few critics can make a living at it now. I was one of the last and luckiest of that breed – the full-time newspaper critic. It was a privilege to be able to devote myself to the craft, but most newspaper critics have gone the way of newspapers. In the US and the UK, hundreds of critics have been “let go”. Even in France, where the idea of the serious critic was honed and hardened, few can make a living that way. I want to exit the stage before the bear catches up with me. It has always seemed more like fun than work and I am grateful for all the fish. So goodnight and good luck, dear readers. Can someone please turn on the lights?

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