This is not a nostalgia piece. Nostalgia is for the thing you want back. What I'm arguing for is not the return of the long-form film review - the infrastructure that supported it is gone and won't return. What I'm arguing is that we should be honest about what disappeared when it went.
THE KAEL REVIEW AND WHAT IT COULD DO
Pauline Kael's review of Bonnie and Clyde in The New Yorker in 1967 ran to approximately 9,000 words. It engaged with the film's formal choices in detail, placed it in the context of American film history, argued with the critical consensus, made predictions about what the film meant for the future of American cinema, revised its own positions mid-argument, and ended somewhere different from where it started.
A 9,000-word review in a major publication is now impossible. Not because editors would refuse it - because the audience metrics that determine editorial decisions show that longer pieces lose readers at predictable points, and the advertising economics that fund publications require audience volume rather than audience depth. The infrastructure that made the Kael review possible was the infrastructure of mass-circulation print criticism with advertising economics that could support long-form work. That infrastructure is gone.
WHAT THE LONG FORM ALLOWED
The long-form review allowed three things that current film discourse can't do. First: genuine argument rather than position-taking. A 9,000-word piece can hold a position, complicate it, revise it, and arrive somewhere that the beginning didn't predict. A 300-word review can't do this. It can state a position. It can support the position with evidence. It can't adequately argue with itself.
Second: contextualisation at scale. A review that can run to 5,000 words can place a film in the context of the director's career, the national cinema tradition, the historical moment, and the critical conversation around similar films - all in the same piece. The short review has to choose one context and imply the rest. The long review can hold multiple contexts simultaneously and show how they interact.
Third: the specific kind of thinking that only happens in extended prose - the thought that arrives in the middle of a sentence you started with a different destination in mind, the connection you make between two things in the act of articulating their relationship rather than in advance of the articulation. Long-form writing produces thinking that short-form writing forecloses.
WHAT REPLACED IT AND THE GAP
What replaced the long-form film review is a combination of: the short-form review (300-600 words, primarily evaluative), the Twitter thread (ostensibly long-form but structurally fragmented), the video essay (formally capable of what written criticism can't do but not what written criticism can), and the podcast (conversational, digressive, good for exploring ideas and bad for arriving at them).
None of these replacements does what the long-form written review did. The short review states positions. The thread fragments argument. The video essay demonstrates but doesn't build consecutive analytical prose. The podcast explores without committing. The specific discipline of extended argumentative prose - the form that required you to hold a complex argument together across thousands of words and deliver it to a reader - has no adequate successor in the current critical infrastructure.
THE NEWSLETTER AS PARTIAL ANSWER
The Substack/newsletter form is the closest current equivalent to the long-form review infrastructure. It allows extended pieces, consistent voice, a subscriber relationship that doesn't require maximum audience volume, and the space to develop an argument across multiple pieces rather than within a single one. The best film newsletters - Film Comment online, some of the Substack writers doing serious work - have recreated elements of the long-form critical infrastructure in a different economic model.
What the newsletter form still can't recreate is the editorial relationship. The Kael piece went through an editing process that challenged the argument, tightened the prose, and produced the specific quality of managed extended argument that characterises the best long-form criticism. The newsletter writer editing their own work is not the same thing. The loss of the editor is as significant as the loss of the platform space.
The loss of the editor is as significant as the loss of the platform space.