Here is the exercise. Read any review of a major recent release. Find the sentences describing what happens. Then find the sentences describing how the film shows you what happens - the visual language, the editing rhythm, the specific formal decisions that made the story visible.
In most reviews, the first category is about eighty percent of the text. In the best reviews, the second category is the whole point. The gap between those two proportions is the gap between reviewing a screenplay and reviewing a film.
Here is the distinction applied to specific films.
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE - THE SCREENPLAY REVIEW MISSES EVERYTHING
The screenplay of In the Mood for Love is formally modest. Two neighbours discover their spouses are having an affair. They simulate the affair they're not having. They don't act on it. One of them leaves. That's the plot. A screenplay review that describes those events has described a sad story about restraint.
The film review notices that Christopher Doyle's cinematography holds every composition in the amber and red of a specific nostalgic palette - not 1962 Hong Kong's actual colours, but the emotional temperature of memory for that period. That the slow-motion sequences are calibrated to put you inside the duration of longing rather than observing it from outside. That the camera withholds what the screenplay's events make you expect - it cuts away before the moments that would be the plot points in a conventional film. The film is not about what happens. It is about what doesn't happen, experienced at the pace of what doesn't happen. The screenplay review misses the entire formal argument.
PARASITE - THE CLASS ARGUMENT IS IN THE DESIGN, NOT THE DIALOGUE
The Parasite screenplay is a remarkable formal achievement - the structure, the reveals, the specific way information is withheld and released. A screenplay review can describe this accurately. What a screenplay review can't describe is what Hong Kyung-pyo and production designer Lee Ha-jun built: the Park house as a formal argument about class before a word of class analysis is spoken.
The glass walls that flood the space with light. The garden that represents a class's ownership of nature as an aesthetic resource. The architectural relationship between levels - the upstairs, the main level, the garden, and the underground space that the third act reveals - is a vertical hierarchy that the architecture was always encoding. A screenplay review describes the twist. A film review describes why the twist was always structurally necessary, which requires describing the space.
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA - THE EDIT IS THE ARGUMENT
The Manchester by the Sea screenplay is, by any reasonable measure, one of the best original screenplays of the last decade. The plot, the dialogue, the character construction - these are formally accomplished in ways that a literary analysis can describe precisely.
What the screenplay review misses is that the film's most formally distinctive quality is its editing structure - the way it intercuts the present with the past without the conventional signals (the dissolve, the desaturation, the musical cue) that tell you a flashback is happening. The past intrudes into the present at the pace of traumatic memory rather than at the pace of conventional flashback narrative. The formal argument is in the edit. The script doesn't contain it. The film is built around it.
DRIVE MY CAR - THE THREE HOURS ARE THE ARGUMENT
The Hamaguchi film that most clearly exposes the screenplay/film gap. The first forty minutes of Drive My Car - before the title card appears - contain material that most films would not include. A prologue that is, formally, about establishing the specific way time functions in the relationship between Yusuke and Oto before Oto's death. A screenplay note might say 'establish the marriage.' The film takes forty minutes to establish the specific texture of a marriage in ways that make the absence of Oto in the subsequent two hours structurally legible.
A screenplay review describes a three-hour film about grief and Chekhov. A film review describes what three hours at this specific pace, at this specific camera distance, does to your relationship to the characters' time - so that the ending's quiet devastation is earned by the duration rather than manufactured by the plot.
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATION
The practical implication is not that story doesn't matter. It does. The practical implication is that the story in the script and the argument in the film are different things, and reviewing the story rather than the argument is reviewing the wrong object. The film you watched was not the screenplay. It was the translation of the screenplay into a formal experience - and the translation is where most of the meaning lives.
The gap between those two proportions is the gap between reviewing a screenplay and reviewing a film.