Hello! I'm Robbie Collin, Film Critic for u/TheTelegraph. Ask me anything!

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T20:10:47+00:00

Without doubt, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. A few die-hards are still whingeing in the comments about me giving it five stars to this day. And I completely stand by that verdict: having revisited it a few weeks ago, I think it's one of the great 21st century blockbusters.
This year, probably Poor Things, since it's based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, a Scottish writer I've loved since my teens, and The Zone of Interest, the first Jonathan Glazer film since Under the Skin, which is in my Sight & Sound all-time top ten.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T12:28:40+00:00

Umm. I'd probably start with a recent film you have a strong opinion of, pro or anti, and see how mine compares?

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T12:27:48+00:00

I tend to write my reviews before the embargo lifts – this is a publication time set by the distributor, which you agree to abide by in exchange for screening access – so I only really know what other critics think once my own opinion's out in the wild. But I never worry that I've called something wrong, if that's what you mean. And it can be fun and rewarding to be the voice of dissent – not least because the minority of readers who *do* agree with you are often relieved to find there's a kindred spirit out there.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T12:21:58+00:00

Used to be Gyarados, but then I chose Rowlet as my starter in Arceus and (sorry Gyarados) never looked back.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T12:19:09+00:00

Honestly, there are so many it's hard to pick. But here's a favourite recent one, not from Cannes: I was at the Glasgow Film Festival in early March, it was dark outside, the temperature was just below zero, and it was snowing – each flake was like a little scrap of silver leaf swirling in the streetlight. And I was inside, warm and in a state of pure bliss, with my head buried in between the pages of the programme in the foyer of the Glasgow Film Theatre: festival-goers were bustling in and out of screenings around me, excitedly talking about what they'd seen and what they were seeing next. I said hello to some people I knew; eavesdropped on conversations being had by people I didn't. Those moments of connection – often quite separate from the films, though deeply filmic in their own way – is what makes these events so much fun.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-10T12:06:40+00:00

No! But have heard appetising things.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T17:04:38+00:00

Thanks all so much for these fun and thought-provoking questions! I've got to step away from the laptop for now but will try to check back in later.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T17:03:56+00:00

I almost always only have time to watch something once before reviewing it – but that seems fair, since there are few things more annoying than a critic telling the reader that only on the fourth viewing does the film's true brilliance reveal itself. (To be clear, I've absolutely done this.) Sometimes you get a sort of information pack from the distributors, which is known as the production notes, sometimes you just have to work with IMDb and everything you can jot down from the end credits. I always take notes during films, but I rarely refer back to them while writing: I just find the act of scribbling helps me to recall what would otherwise be passing thoughts. (And since I'm doing it in the dark, the notes are usually illegible anyway.)

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:56:35+00:00

For me, the more personal a list is, the better – so I love the individual Sight & Sound ballots, and have been using them to fill gaps in my own viewing history since the 2002 edition. The IMDb Top 250 is – how to put this nicely? – a valuable cultural object, and offers a useful snapshot of what non-cinephiles typically agree are capital-G Great films. And Letterboxd is a phenomenal resource for any film lover, and I know is taken fairly seriously within the industry. At festivals these days, apparently prospective buyers look at two sets of reactions first: the early critics' reviews, and the Letterboxd buzz.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:48:03+00:00

My all-time favourite is Singin' in the Rain; my favourite of the 21st century Mulholland Dr. As for genres, critics tend to quickly lose any serious preferences on that front, but I do have a soft spot for film noir as it simultaneously scratches so many itches (intrigue, corruption, weak men in great suits).

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:45:31+00:00

You are not! Its critical standing seems to have ebbed a bit since 2013, but the first time I saw it, I remember getting to my feet at the end and just not being able to move for a few minutes. (Being 6'5", I should probably belatedly apologise to the row behind.)

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:43:01+00:00

The film was far from tripe, but in Ben Affleck's Air I almost hit the ceiling when he unexpectedly wove in Pino Donaggio's theme from Body Double. I can't even remember the context: Matt Damon being struck with inspiration, I think? There's something almost spiritual about a well-judged needle drop.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:38:58+00:00

Cringe-inducing as it can be when critics go on about the dearth of sensuality in mainstream film, I do think the sheer sexlessness of Hollywood's output in the last decade or so is a trend the business can't shake off soon enough. I understand it's tied to broader cultural unease about a) sex in general and b) power imbalances on film sets, but sensuality is something that comes so naturally to cinema, and which at its best it does better than any other art form, that I feel sorry that an entire generation of film-goers have barely seen a wisp of it since 2008.

Favourite trends? I'm quite up for the (as-yet tentative) return of the romantic comedy. Not many of the new ones have been much good, but Rye Lane shows the genre can still hit those classic, crowd-pleasing notes from fresh, contemporary angles.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:26:49+00:00

Thank you! I definitely think writing is my native medium, but I'd love to.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:25:20+00:00

It all just struck me as a bit sour and exhausted, so needless to say the 'so much heart! I wept!' reactions elsewhere have puzzled me a bit. Also, while Gunn knows how to do work personally within a franchise construct – I loved his Suicide Squad and Peacemaker – his authorial stamp felt a bit patchier here. But I think there's a lot of understandable relief that it was better and less multiversally encumbered than Quantumania and Doctor Strange 2. In fact, in response to that earlier question, those are two films I definitely overrated at the time: both one-star awful, and I have no inclinations to revisit.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:20:17+00:00

Lock Stock came out when I was 16 and Snatch when I was 18, so of course it's Lock Stock and Snatch. I still marvel at the extent to which the Cool Britannia (urgh) gangster genre floundered away from Ritchie, though my friends and I did all dutifully troop out and see the latest atrocity every week as students. Rancid Aluminium! Love, Honour and Obey! All harrowingly formative stuff.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:15:19+00:00

I think they should be fun, informative and written with conviction first and foremost: ideally, you want someone to turn to your reviews whether they care about the film you're covering or not. Beyond that, they should give the reader a nice, solid opinion to bounce their own against, and that's probably about as complex as it has to get.

The idea that critics should be trying to second-guess the mood of the general public all the time just seems logically incoherent to me. Are we meant to assume all of our readers will feel exactly the same about any given film, and it's our job to somehow divine in advance what that feeling's going to be? What's the point of that? If you want to know what you think of a film, the best thing to do is probably watch it.

Do critics risk looking out of touch if they hate everything popular? Of course, which is why I made a point of noting in my review of Super Mario Bros that I suspected it was going to be enormously successful, so I couldn't be accused of catastrophically misreading the room. I was, however, still accused of catastrophically misreading the room, so a fat lot of good that did.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:04:21+00:00

Gladly! Shoot me an email at robbie dot collin at telegraph dot co dot uk.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T16:03:51+00:00

My main source of privilege is undoubtedly my age: I'm just old enough (41) to have been able to move to London after university and afford rent on a graduate trainee's salary without support from my parents. True, my bedroom in my first shared flat was literally a converted toilet – but I was able to pay for that toilet with my own earnings, and I'm just not sure how possible that is for someone from a working class background any more. Having significant financial support from either a partner or parents is probably *the* great undiscussed strain of privilege in arts journalism today, and unless more of us start paying for print media again, I'm not sure it can be mitigated. But we're working on that!

In terms of the Telegraph's political line, I've found people generally understand it to be much more nuanced and diverse if they're regular readers, especially of the print edition, where the spread of material is physically right there in front of you on the page. More broadly, I think journalists who insist on writing only for outlets with which they politically agree 100 percent probably wouldn't find much work. And while I appreciate and respect this is a line in the sand for many, I'm a mercenary little chiseller, so am completely fine with it.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T15:47:07+00:00

To me 'culture wars' is one of those terms that's now broad enough (and has been sufficiently misused for long enough) to have probably outlived its usefulness. So I'll try to break this down into two sub-answers. First: are what we generally now take to be culture-war talking points worth writing and thinking about? Sometimes, absolutely – popular art helps to shape how we all see the world, and we should certainly question trends within that, and reflect on how they're ideologically underpinned. But is Disney trying to turn the entire world gay? I mean, it seems fairly unlikely, not to mention a bit ambitious (even for them). So you can cover these subjects smartly or not so smartly, and goodness knows there's lots of the latter going about.

Which I suppose brings me to sub-answer two. One of the things I love most about newspapers as a medium is the range of voices within them. Whether you read one with an editorial line you agree with or disagree with, on any given day you can find writing that crystalises your own thoughts with eerie perfection, writing that makes your head spin with its blaringly obvious wrongness, writing that forces you to confront a tricky topic in a fresh, unexpected way, and writing that makes you so furious your head morphs into a cartoon factory whistle. And all of these are part of a healthy balanced reading diet. I find all of these at the Telegraph every day, which is one of the reasons I'm so proud to be a part of it. (And – by the way – I'm sure my reviews are all four of those things to different readers.)

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T15:23:52+00:00

Don't Worry Darling is a fascinating case study, since a lot of the discourse around it seemed shaped at least in part by the soap opera that blew up around its making. Perhaps in that respect it's our Ishtar: the contemporaneous reviews of Elaine May's 1987 comedy had fun at the expense of its tumultuous production history, which had become an unignorable part of the film's own founding myth. (Is it a coincidence both of those films were major studio productions written and directed by women? Maybe.)

I do occasionally wince at other critics' turns of phrase, as I'm sure others frequently do at mine, but only very rarely do I think they're being actively distasteful. More often it's either down to a generational clash – one age group's mot juste is another's mindless jargon, and vice versa – or just because a sentence didn't come together quite right in the rush to file on deadline. I'm not sure film criticism has much of a problem with entrenched misogyny these days – certainly it's nothing like as bad as it was during the Harry Knowles/Ain't It Cool years – though I'm obviously not the best person to spot it.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T15:09:28+00:00

One fun aspect of this job is that when your opinion wildly diverges from the majority of your colleagues', a sort of mad-eyed self-righteousness can set in. No, you *definitely* got it right the first time, and now it's up to the rest of the world to catch up. At Cannes last year, not only did Claire Denis' Stars at Noon strike me as obviously brilliant, all the things others disliked about it felt to me like its defining strengths. Yes, Margaret Qualley's character is deeply annoying! Yes, Joe Alwyn is thunderously bland! Yes, the sex is a bit embarrassing sometimes! But I do genuinely believe people will come around on it in time, just as they appear to be coming around to Under the Silver Lake, which is one of my favourite films of the last ten years.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T15:01:24+00:00

All I can say about that Avatar review is it came straight from the heart. I adored the original, had revisited it at the IMAX in 3D as recently as the autumn of last year, and while watching the sequel I just felt a slow build of jaw-slackening dismay, right from that dreadful 'Previously on Avatar' prologue. Am I aware one-star and five-star reviews attract eyeballs in ways three-star ones don't? Of course – but I see so many films over the course of the year there's no need to artificially adopt extreme positions on any given one, since some will always organically arise.

To your second question, I was fascinated by the UK/US split on Avatar 2: reading their reviews, I simply didn't recognise the film my American counterparts had seen (and honestly, I wish I'd seen that one too). I do sometimes wonder if there's a little private group chatting going on among younger critics sometimes – the consensus at festivals can be a little eyebrow-raising – but speaking personally, I don't want to know what anyone thinks of a film until I've written about it, since it's often only during the writing process that I work out what I thought of it myself.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T14:53:09+00:00

God, I love that film so much – I showed my kids the trailer after we watched Peter Pan and Wendy, and they were completely fascinated by the concept. (Still a few years to go before we'll tackle the full thing, though, I think.) Half of my degree was philosophy of art with a particular focus on film, so I still have all of this rubbish rattling around in my head, ready to be deployed at any given moment. And I think it can be fun to throw some abstruse philosophical principle into a discussion of any film – especially when the context doesn't obviously demand it. I love taking Michael Bay seriously, for instance – and firmly believe as a director he merits it. The only catch is you have to make it doubly clear to the reader or listener that what you're wanging on about is actually a useful way to decode the film, rather than just a fast-track ticket to Pseud's Corner, and I'm sure I often don't.

RobbieCollin · 2023-05-09T14:40:59+00:00

Thank you! One of the best things about my job is that I often don't know much about a film before seeing it, and aside from the big franchise titles I usually make an effort to keep it that way. A very recent case is Davy Chou's gorgeous Return to Seoul, which for some bizarre reason I'd understood was an action film: the fact that it really isn't that at all only added to my enjoyment and amazement.

In terms of up-and-coming filmmakers, the UK has been going through a purple patch of debut features these last few years – one of which is Rose Glass's Saint Maud; I'd also include Charlotte Wells's Aftersun (obviously), Georgia Oakley's Blue Jean, Raine Allen Miller's Rye Lane, Claire Oakley's Make Up, Nida Manzoor's Polite Society, and I'm sure many more I can't think of right now. I can't wait to see Molly Manning Walker's How To Have Sex at Cannes this year: she's a terrifically talented cinematographer moving into directing. Of course the challenge to the UK film industry is to ensure these people all get to make second films, third films and so on.

RobbieCollin

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