I don't think some of you understand just how goofy that sounds. When an actor plays a blind character, critics don't generally feel obligated to hit Google and make sure the actor hasn't recently lost his/her sight in real life. The default assumption is that the actor is, y'know, acting.

No. One can allow a dopey-looking thing to occur without necessarily being dopey oneself. But DuVall ought to have realized that having Smulders play the part on her real-life crutches would look like facile symbolism, and have either rewritten the script to combat the problem or (more sensibly) recast the role.

I don't think it's incumbent upon a critic to check and see whether any injury or ailment a character experiences in a film was necessitated by the actor's real-life injury or ailment. Rather, it's incumbent upon the filmmaker to incorporate it in a way that doesn't come across as dopey (or to recast the part).

When the shot is as needlessly flashy as the ones I'm complaining about, I'm conscious of it on first viewing. Indeed, if it didn't fairly scream LOOK NO CUTTING!! I don't think it would ever bother me. The infamous Children of Men scene is a perfect example—it blows my mind that anyone could somehow be unaware of how…

The distraction doesn't stem from obsessively looking for actual mistakes (which one would never find except in a case like this, where the errors are a deliberate joke). It stems from a growing awareness, as the shot goes on and on and becomes more and more technically complex, that any mistake would require starting…

Yes. That's what it means. (Though, sarcasm aside, I do think Rope is a pointless stunt, as I said in the linked Victoria review.)

Actually, Stop Making Sense is one of my favorite films of all time. And I do in fact generally try to avoid reviewing documentaries that I'm likely to find useless. It isn't always possible.

Tarr's version of this kind of shot tends to work for me, though the one that kicks off The Man From London gets a bit ludicrous. I think it's because he moves the camera so slowly and deliberately. It never seems like he's trying to impress. And of course I'm totally down with the shots of people walking forever in Sá…

No, he plays another Resistance dude.

Yeah, those were the films I was referring to. Especially Cecil, which is really just plain lame. I certainly didn't intend readers to interpret "eventually" as "literally every film Waters made after this one."

Everybody thinks I'm a millennial. I've been a professional film critic for almost 20 years. (Previously at EW, Time Out New York, and Esquire, among other venues.)

Doubt many people would get the Craven from that. I actually originally wrote The Last Little House on the Left on the Prairie, but it just didn't seem to work.

Never mentioned once. It's a not a documentary about Tony Robbins. It's a documentary about this one event he runs (which doesn't include fire-walking, I don't think).

It's just that she doesn't know if he's "the one" or not. And they wind up getting back together, for which the film somehow gives Robbins credit.

You're absolutely right, but this piece doesn't address the entire film. It's about this particular scene, in which Aaron doesn't appear. (Still, I could have included an aside about the general dichotomy.)

True. But I take issue with the terminology nonetheless. And as I said, it doesn't fundamentally change what I'd write—I'd just have spent a paragraph distinguishing between the two types of intelligence and then had to repeatedly, clumsily characterize the one Tom lacks much of as "intellectual intelligence" or…

Small-c catholicism. "Including a wide variety of things; all-embracing: her taste is pretty catholic." Sorry for the confusion.

Thank you. (Technically it means below 100. But it doesn't mean 50, which is what some folks here seem to think.)

Damn, that's a strong counterargument. While I agree that the qualities you cite can be just as important, or more important, than intelligence, though, I've never bought the idea of calling them "emotional intelligence." That strikes me as special pleading. And even if I did buy it, this piece wouldn't change…

As I said, it's the combination of the volume and the catholicism that makes Gibney seem opportunistic to me, as if he literally finishes one film and immediately looks around to ask, "Okay, what can I make a documentary about next?" The analogy to a beat reporter isn't really sound, in my opinion—it's not as if…