This is not a rant. Rants are imprecise. What follows is a list of specific habits, each with a name, a mechanism, and a description of the damage it does to film discourse.
HABIT 1 - THE STAR RATING AS CRITICISM SUBSTITUTE
A star rating is a grade without a reason. Grades without reasons are useful for aggregation and useless for understanding. When a film's critical reception is reduced to its aggregate star rating, everything about what the film is doing - the formal choices, the argument, the specific qualities that make it worth or not worth watching - disappears. What remains is a number that tells you roughly how many people roughly approved. The habit: treating the rating as the criticism rather than as the smallest possible summary of a criticism that should exist.
HABIT 2 - THE AUTEUR ALIBI
'This film works because [director] always...' - the reflexive invocation of directorial consistency as criticism. If you can predict what a film does before you've seen it because you know the director, the auteur alibi substitutes the retrospective pattern for the specific analysis of this specific film. The habit produces a critical mode that is less about what the film is doing than about how it fits the pre-existing narrative. Films are not illustrations of a career. They are the career.
HABIT 3 - THE GENRE DEFENCE
'For a horror film, this is actually...' - the preemptive lowering of the bar that allows the reviewer to praise something for meeting reduced criteria. Every genre is capable of formal achievement at the highest level. Every genre is capable of being formally empty. The genre is not a defence and it is not an accusation. It is a formal vocabulary. Judge the film against what cinema can do, not against what genre films usually do.
HABIT 4 - THE DISCOURSE RESPONSE
Writing criticism in response to what the discourse is saying rather than what the film is doing. The review that spends its first three paragraphs positioning itself relative to the existing critical conversation before it says anything about the film. The counter-take that exists to occupy the contrarian position rather than to make a specific argument about the film. The discourse response produces critical positions that are determined by the discourse rather than by the film.
HABIT 5 - THE EMOTIONAL CREDENTIAL
'I cried twice' - the personal emotional response as a quality argument. The emotional credential confuses the film's effect on you with the film's formal achievement. Films can produce strong emotional responses through formal cheapness - through manipulation, through score that tells you how to feel before the film has earned it, through narrative that produces grief through plot mechanics rather than through formal precision. The question is not what the film made you feel. It is how it made you feel that, and whether the mechanism was earned.
HABIT 6 - THE COMPARABILITY TRAP
'Like if [film X] and [film Y] had a baby' - the reference comparison as analysis. The film as a combination of other films locates it in a network of references but says nothing about what it is. Films are not combinations of their influences. Understanding a film's formal vocabulary requires understanding what it's doing, not what it resembles. The comparability trap is especially damaging for films from traditions the critic doesn't know deeply - the CJK film that is described as 'a bit Tarkovsky, a bit Wong Kar-wai' because the critic doesn't have a richer vocabulary for what the film is doing.
HABIT 7 - THE GATEKEEPING PREREQUISITE
'You can't really understand this film without having seen...' - the credential requirement that positions expertise as prior to engagement. Film knowledge is built through engagement, not required before engagement. The film that requires twenty years of formal cinema education to appreciate is either a very niche film or has been badly explained by everyone who's talked about it. Most of the films that seem to require prerequisites are accessible on first encounter if approached without defensiveness.
HABIT 8 - THE PACING COMPLAINT
'The pacing was off' - the vague formal criticism that names a perceived problem without locating it or explaining it. Pacing is not a property a film has independently of its formal choices. A film's pacing is the result of its editing, its scene length, its sound design, its relationship between action and reaction. 'The pacing was off' means 'something about the film's temporal construction didn't work for me.' The useful version says what, where, and why.
HABIT 9 - THE REPRESENTATION AUDIT
Using representation as the primary analytical framework for every film regardless of whether representation is the film's primary formal concern. A film can be formally extraordinary and demographically unrepresentative. A film can be demographically representative and formally bankrupt. The representation audit is a useful tool applied to the right question. Applied as a universal framework, it produces criticism that assesses films on criteria they may not be engaging with.
HABIT 10 - THE SPOILER POLITICS
The spoiler warning culture has produced a specific distortion in film criticism: the critical apparatus that avoids specific description to avoid spoiling, which produces vague praise and vague criticism in place of specific analysis. The formal argument of a film is almost never spoilable in a way that meaningfully reduces the experience of watching it. The ending of The Conversation is more interesting to discuss before you've seen it than after - because knowing that Caul destroys his own apartment looking for a bug he planted himself changes what you're watching for. Criticism that can't describe what a film does in order to protect the experience of watching it has confused information with experience.
Grades without reasons are useful for aggregation and useless for understanding.