Manifesto of Miles

An esteemed professor of critical writing once asked me and a group of my peers what we felt the role of the critic was. At the time, I was fortunate enough to have taken the opportunity to publish a few practice reviews for the school paper before this point, and like some of my fellow writers on Dawg Flicks, I have been an avid magazine (and website) review reader for most of my life.

So I turned my chair around in my cozy little back corner of the classroom, and I wrote the first thing that came to my mind. It went something like this:

"The responsibility of a critic is that of an honest audience member to another. An audience knows what it wants to see—what it expects—and it is not the critic's job to define what they themselves expect, but rather to understand the audience's expectations and objectively convey how they have or have not been met."

Okay, so I've added a few words since those first few days of class, but I am proud to say that the principle remains the same.

Go out there and review to your heart's content, but don't let the readers walk away with an impression of how much you liked it. Give them a strong impression of how much they are going to like it, and your job, as they say, is done.