Critics serve various functions, often more than one, depending on the
critic. Critics who work for "general interest" publications usually
have the obligation to try to help readers decide if they would like to
see the film. Critics can also try to educate by providing information
or context that the viewer might not otherwise have. Critics can also
try to change the way people see, by plumbing those valuable aspects of
a film that depend on formal elements that most viewers miss.

About money, film criticism is one of those professions like acting, or
being a "fine art" painter, in which the supply of people who want to do
it is much greater than the demand for it. Hence we have many critics
who write for almost nothing, and many more who write for free, of late
on "Joe's movie page" and the like. Last time I looked, there weren't
any lawyers advising multinational corporations on tax questions for free.

The question of what a good film is "about" is all too often separated
from its style. For a director like, er, Spielberg, that may be the
right approach, but for the filmmakers whose work I love, that's a huge
mistake, in my view. You could look at the script and say "Imitation of
Life" is about race relations, or New York, or the acting profession, or
any one of a number of other things, and if course it is "about" all of
those things, just David is not wrong in his list of what "Seven Women"
is about. But seen through Sirk's lens-eye, the patterns of hopelessness
and notions of "Sirkian impossibility" become controlling, with moments
such as Sarah Jane's grasping at flowers at the end of that great crane
in constituting the not-so-secret-"center" of the film's concerns.
Similarly, the diagonal compositions and lighting, the clutter of the
frames, the mixture of presence and incredible distance in "Seven Women"
create an elegiac vision of a community's collapse, and I find it
impossible to separate the little lesbian sub-plot from all that;
rather, it reinforces it.

I don't mean to suggest that my little blending of formal description
and thematic extraction exhausts these films, and in that sense I partly
agree with JPC; people could easily make plausible cases for the style
supporting other themes. But I think those cases usually have to be made
through the compositions and lighting and editing, if the film meets my
own standards for greatness.

- Fred C.