All reviews of the arts are ultimately about opinion and these opinions should be clear to the reader. In film, what the reviewer considers the central goal of the film is the most important fact that can be stated. While it is possible for set design, costume design, lighting, acting, framing, and editing to be judged individually on less personal criteria, these individual evaluations don’t constitute a review of a film except in the most minimal sense. Only when these parts are viewed as a cohesive whole can a useful perspective be drawn from the disparate collection of opinions. Whether a film succeeds or fails, whether a film achieves a height of greatness or wallows in the dirt, is the result of the individual parts, but the ultimate criterion is the unity of the piece. The unity of all the parts can only be found in the intention or goal of the film. Judged as a standalone work, the intention of a film may seem different from reviewer to reviewer. Since the central goal or intention is what pulls an opinion of a film together, it is crucial that this goal be made known to the reader, so that they may judge the logic of your opinion for themselves.
If parts are considered individually, personal opinion can run completely unchecked. Does the reviewer have biases in lighting and acting? Does the reviewer have biases in costuming choices and editing? Taken individually, the various aspects of a film can be analyzed from a very personal point of view—but this point of view is a difficult thing to make clear, or for the reviewer to even be aware of. Stringing together varying opinions on the aspects of a film makes for an incoherent review, as these opinions may not always mesh.
The first unifying aspect of the whole is craft. Craft is the competency with which a part and the whole are put together. Although there is a limited range in which craft can be divined within each part without the overview of the whole, craft, as with everything else, is largely reviewed in terms of the big picture. This is why it is so important to determine exactly what the overall goal of a film is. Typically, craft is measured in terms of how skillfully each aspect advances the goal of the film. For a film determined to tell a story, costuming, set design, and acting are gauged on their ability to create a coherent world, while editing and framing are gauged on their ability to tell the story being represented. Unless a film is going off the beaten track, set design, costuming, acting, even lighting are easy to review because their sole goal is to create a coherent world for the story. To the end of telling a story, framing and editing can be judged by the smoothness and coherency with which they tell the story. At their most basic, editing and framing are judged by their invisibility.
Craft, however, cannot be separated from style and it is style that introduces all the thorny problems of film theory. In film, style is subjective in both creation and appreciation—it is the personal touch that makes a creation unique, but style that also makes a work open to other personal interpretations. This duel subjectivity makes style a difficult thing to convincingly review. But it is the multitude of style and the conflicting opinions that oppose each style that make each film more or less distinctive, more or less divisive. It is the diversity of man that makes critique possible—it is that same diversity that makes opinion so fallible. Without craft, style has no expression—without style, craft has no uniqueness. It is the thing that makes complete certainty impossible that draws us to examine cinema.
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