I think the point of no return was when Empire film magazine gave Avatar a five-star review and seemed to champion it from that moment onward. At that stage in my life that was enough for me to label Empire as a sellout and stop buying it. To this day I have boxes of Empire magazine stored away. There was Film review (always seemed boring to me) and Sight and sound (too darn clever for its own good) and SFX (The Sci-Fi nerd one), but Empire was the cool one. This might be urban myth, but I’ve quoted it as fact for so long that I’m not going to stop now. When fans had an ongoing debate in the letters page about who in Reservoir Dogs killed nice guy Eddie, Tarantino himself wrote in to say, “No one killed Nice Guy Eddie. A squib went off and Chris Penn went along with it and fell down as though he’d been shot.” And I’m sticking with that story. I do know that you can read online that Chris Penn told that story in 1996. It was a technical error and they kept it in the film.

Empire was cool. Quinten Frickin Tarantino read it. What the hell were they doing backing Avatar? Couldn’t they see that 3D films was just a fad? It had been and gone in the 50s and 80s and was nothing but a gimmick that is supposed to immerse you in the film but actually managed to have the opposite effect by making you realise at all times that you were watching a 3D film. People seemed to feel that the visual spectacle could counter the lack of anything else.

Oh boy. Just writing that now and I almost left the building and went to kidnap James Cameron. I forget sometimes how much I dislike the idea of 3D films. More accurately, I don’t like the way 3D is used to tell stories because the content of what you’re watching is overshadowed by being aware of the 3D effects. Simply put, it’s a distraction. I could be wrong. Avatar 2D, 3D or 4D could be a five star film. It could be the greatest film ever, despite many reports of the story, dialogue and characters being arguably weak.

I count that as the moment I gave up on film reviews. At least Empire saw it to be controversial when their reviewer gave Silence of the Lambs on video a bad review. When released in the cinema Empire gave Silence of the lambs five stars. The film went on to win five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. And yet the review of the film when it came out on video was far from favourable and kicked off a debate that left Empire writers debating with one another and letter writing readers writing in questioning how anyone could think anything of the classic multi award winning film other than it being a five-star film. But, there was debate about it. I felt with Avatar, that there was no debate, that we were expected to overlook any flaws in the film because it was 3D.

Speaking of Oscars: Between 1998 and the appearance of that Empire Avatar review in 2009, my faith in professional opinion regarding film had been eroding. I started seeing the Oscars as a farce. That was when Jack Nicholson won Best Actor for As Good as it gets, a film I do remember loving at the time. And you could be pretty sure that Matt Damon was out of the running for best actor when, earlier in the night, he and Ben Affleck won the Oscar for best original screenplay for Good Will Hunting. It’s almost as though they wanted to give Jack his Oscar and Damon was young enough to have another go some other time. But he deserves something, so let’s give him the Oscar for Original Screenplay. None of which makes it seem like any Oscar is ever given on acting merit alone.

I know that this is arguably all open to interpretation but for my money Jack Nicholson, as colourful as his character in As Good as it gets is, as much as it is a tour de force of how full-on Jack Jack can be, it doesn’t match the complexity of Matt Damon’s protagonist in Good Will Hunting. I grant you that I’m not providing any actual evidence here. But I will add that when a film wins best screenplay and the lead in that film is ninety percent of the film, that even when he’s off screen people are talking about the character and the damn title of the film is Good Will Hunting staring Matt Damon as Will Hunting, then I say, give Will Hunting the Oscar for both writing and acting.

More than anything else though, it just smacked of it being a consolation prize to win Best Screenplay and the narrative of the award going to the veteran actor for a whirlwind performance instead of the newcomer is something that stood out for me.

It wasn’t until 1999 that I fully believed in the idea of the “Make-up Oscar.” Not the “Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.” That’s a real thing and always has been. I’m referring to the practice of awarding an Oscar to make up for not giving one previously when it was rightly deserved. 1998 was the year that Judi Dench didn’t win best actress for the film Mrs Brown. I don’t have strong opinions on whether the Oscar should have gone to Helen Hunt, as it did, or Judi Dench. What does stand out is that the next year Judi Dench did win best supporting actress for less than ten minutes on screen in Shakespeare in love. I’m not sure that was “making up” for not winning the year before, but you could describe it as a cameo more than a supporting role, and they don’t have an Academy award for cameos.

Hats off to George Clooney in 2005 though, for doing what Matt Damon couldn’t. Damon being a fresh-faced young actor couldn’t have the pluck to say it but Clooney, with all the pluck and respect in the world could. When he won best supporting actor for Syriana the first words out of his mouth were, “Wow. Alright, I’m not winning director.” Sure enough, he did not win best director for Goodnight and good luck. I’m not saying that he should have won best director, but the nod to how things work at the Oscars was there for all to see.

I guess the whole point of this is to give some sort of background to show how we’ve reached a point where we’re not really sure who we trust now when it comes to opinion about film. We’ve reached a point where no one bats an eyelid when Mark Kermode, in an interview with Christopher Nolan says the following:  “I was very aware of the size of Dark Knight rises and as we got to the end of the film I heaved a sigh of relief and the sigh of relief was, he’s done it, he’s got through this massive trilogy and he hasn’t let us down.”

Since when was the benchmark, “Not letting us down?” It’s just not the first thing that comes to mind after a good film, sighing and being relieved that you weren’t let down. It makes me think of someone doing a bad job of something and someone else saying, “Well, you gave a good effort.” It’s not so much what was said but how it was said. There’s a big difference between, “Wow, you certainly didn’t let us down,” and sighing in relief because “he got through it.”

I’d have been asking questions like this: “How do you feel you can justify that your protagonist seems to spend forty five minutes climbing out of a hole and your villain mumbles all the way through the film in a way that I think people are going to ape in comedic fashion for years to come? Also, do you think this might mark the biggest waste of any Catwoman in any incarnation of Batman stories? But, for the record, I do feel that outside of those things, and that I can’t remember what happened in the film at all, you didn’t let Mark Kermode down.”

Kermode’s book “The good the bad and the multiplex” is very good and I’ve always had a lot of time for him. But I once had a lot of time for Empire Magazine too. I’m not going to speak for everyone here. If you’re with me on this then you can ask yourself the same questions. If you’re not, you can ask yourself the questions and pretend you live in a world with diminishing expectations of expert opinion on film. If, for some reason we do live in a time when you can’t rely on film reviews then what’s left to fill the void?

One interesting thing about review sites like Rotten Tomatoes is that what you now have is an amalgamation of critics and separate amalgamation of film goers and no one opinion, no one voice, as though a Rotten Tomatoes score is a scientific equation. I say this as someone who has fallen in love with films after seeing the poster for the film, so I know that there are some films that I don’t need convincing about, but I want a reviewer to talk me into watching a film. An aggregate score is not the same as a well written review. I’m now thinking about how I had no interest in reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho until I went to Clive Bloom’s lecture on it. Words and ideas goddamnit. That’s where we should be looking. Let someone make you say, “They’ve got a good argument there.”

I do know that there are reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from both professional critics and filmgoing members of the public. I don’t want to say that Rotten Tomatoes is only there to give a film a score out of one hundred and it’s all about numbers, but that does seem to be the focus. People ask, “What score did Rotten Tomatoes give it?” And what do you do with that number anyway? I can think of a few films that were not a box office success, were not critically well received. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner comes to mind. How would that have scored? The success of that film came years after its release.  No number of tomatoes could explain why I love that film. Its success remains a mystery. Even Harrison Ford hated it. He hated starring in it and doubly hated having to do the voice over that the studio insisted on to try and make the film more palatable to your average audience. Harrison ford would not have given any tomatoes for this film.

Then there’s been the times when a negative review has made me want to watch a film. When Alexander Walker, writing for the Evening Standard, wrote that David Fincher’s Fight Club was “an inadmissible assault on personal decency,” I was the first in line at the Picture Playhouse cinema at South End Green NW3. It was the perfect fleapit for Fight Club. In reality, it was one of those films I knew from the moment I saw the poster that it was my type of film. I seem to remember the poster might even have featured a line from Walker’s review. It was a case of bad press being nothing but good for that film.

Amazon has turned us all into film critics, albeit of varying standards. It’s hard to know which way to look or who to trust. There are films that have received terrible reviews from both critics and fans and when I’ve watched them they’re nowhere near as bad as reported. In some cases films were the victim of review bombing. The 2016 Ghostbusters with a female cast of Ghostbuster-ers was slated. It wasn’t that bad. Marvel’s Captain Marvel was rubbished but it’s actually a fun movie. The last Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, for some reason got a lot of flack. It’s a Star Wars film and tells a Star Wars story in a Star Wars-y type way. What more do you want?  But review bombing tends to be socio-politically driven and often anti-woke in nature. And in the case of the films I just mentioned, sadly anti-feminist.

So, what am I left with? Do we all just go blindly to the cinema? Do we need a randomiser app on Netflix to choose what film we watch next? Do I trust Amazon Prime to make suggestions based on things I’ve given a thumbs up to, perhaps sometimes in error? Do we avoid all reviews at all costs?

I think what we need more than anything else is a reality check and for more voices to clearly identify a film for what it is. Think of the 2016 Ghostbusters film being shunned for not having anything to do with the original films and the protagonists all being women. Women? Women Ghostbusters? What do women know about busting ghosts? Did you ever hear a woman say, “Busting makes me feel good?”

Whether a film is any good or not should not hinge on whether or not you, as a reviewer, professional or not, prefer a male or female protagonist. I shouldn’t be able to find any reports of it not being liked because of an all-female cast and because it didn’t acknowledge the original films. Why would that inherently make it a bad film? Why do we let someone else’s arbitrary rules dictate our thoughts on what’s good or bad? Find another reason to dislike it but don’t hate on a film because it isn’t what you wanted it to be. Know what it is. Say what it is. In the case of any Ghostbusters film, I don’t think they were ever meant to be anything but fun. The original was a vehicle for Bill Murray to show how funny he can be and for selling a whole new line of children’s toys. Slimer was only in the film for five minutes and yet Slimer toys must have sold in truck loads. Put in that context, I’m willing to accept a Ghostbusters that chooses to stand on its own without so much as a nod to the original.

 I’m not going to argue whether or not any of the above films are any good. What I am interested in is that the criteria used in creating opinion is far from impartial and above all else, highlights that opinion, particularly when led by personal preference, and reviews are not the same thing. Who can we trust? I’m tempted to say - No one. I want to say, films have been around a long time, and by now you can get a good idea just from the poster and a blurb what any film is. However, a better scenario is that what people will end out wanting is well written reviews. Could we have a section of any review sites that say, “These reviews have been classified as fan-boy reviews and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.” I’d happily write a review under that banner. And we’d have another section entitled, “These people gave a lot of time, effort and thought to bring you these reviews.” And then we can have a comments section where people review the reviews. I confess, I think this probably already exists.

For the record. I don’t do film reviews.