I’ve read Little White Lies both on and offline for years, always relishing their ability to craft cine-literate articles with a populist and welcoming bent.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the podcast, which I often find rambling, ill-focused and, for want of a better word, a little too “base” in its movie criticism. Gone is the discussion on craft and cine-history, replaced with a lot of plot exposition for every movie presented. Why is this more technical critique important? Well, I am a firm believer in the words of Matt Zoller Seitz who - in a piece on the Ebert site a few years ago - implored critics to talk about the filmmaking (not just the story). The film criticism bubble is bloated, and a lack of this technical writing - as a bare minimum threshold - is the root cause.

The rolling cast of contributors is also a patchy affair. Without name shaming, I do find it a little frustrating that there’s a critic on almost every episode that has a very shallow film knowledge, regularly outlining that the film in question is the first they have seen from the director. They often therefore do not follow the motifs or cinema odes the film might be riffing on, again leading to a pretty shallow conversation. (How did they get the job?) On the flipside, Adam Woodward always holds it down.

An assumed improvement to the proceedings could be a more thematic panel discussion (the death of film, the artist vs. the art, the rising anthropological AND commercial value of docs, etc.).

I will absolutely keep listening, and hope this critique is met with the consideration with which it has been written.