A Century of Reflection: On the Present and Future of Film Criticism

A snapshot of an endangered cultural practice: film criticism and the battle for meaning in the attention economy

In the deep green quietude of Gorski Kotar, Croatia, just around the corner from the country’s coastal tourist hotspots, the Cinehill Film Festival hosted a panel titled FIPRESCI 100: The Future of Film Criticism, exploring the shifting role of film criticism in a digitally fragmented world.

It began, as many such panels do, with a nod to the past. To write about film was to map unknown cultural terrain, to name the unnamed, and to filter chaos into canon. In 1925, in Paris, the first initiative was set in motion that, over the following decades, would become FIPRESCI, an organisation bridging film critics across cultures, languages, and ideologies.

A hundred years later, we gathered in a forest, surrounded by the precious, film-loving community to discuss the current state and future of film criticism. Joining the conversation was this year’s Cinehill FIPRESCI jury of three: Hana Samardžija, a gifted and engaged Croatian cultural critic representing the youngest generation; Tina Bernik, Slovenian journalist and critic; and me, Ana Stanić, Croatian critic based in Berlin, board member of the German Film Critics Association (VdFk), and an advocate for new media approaches in film criticism.

Dina Pokrajac, current president of the Croatian Society of Film Critics (HDFK), film programmer, and initiator of the publication Zona Filma, joined the discussion group moderated by Jurica Pavičić, leading Croatian author and film critic, and programmer of Cinehill’s main competition section.

Jurica Pavičić, a senior member of the discussion group, set the tone by offering a historical trajectory. Film criticism once operated from a position of authority, defined by limitations on access to information, space to publish, and institutional backing. It was centralised and hierarchical, mapping film history from atop a tower of privilege. The critic was a cultural cartographer, a canon-builder, someone who told others what mattered.

And now? The collapse of printed media, and of those vertical, monopolistic models, Pavičić noted, has positive and even liberating aspects, but it also opens many questions. Amidst the diversification of knowledge and cultural references, young critics might possess encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese horror while remaining unaware of Fellini.

Is this cultural entropy or simply a shift in informational gravity? What is the role of a critic when everyone can publish? What authority remains in a world without scarcity of access, but with an extreme scarcity of attention? What are our responsibilities and possibilities in the fast-changing landscape of the film industry?

Lacking a crystal ball or an oracle capable of delivering clear answers, we found ourselves in a thoughtful back-and-forth about what we need and what we might be able to do. The traditional critic, the gatekeeper, the curator, the taste-maker, is increasingly replaced by dispersed voices, horizontal platforms, and ephemeral reactions. But does that mean the work has lost value, or only changed its form?

Hana Samardžija added a generational counterpoint. She grew up in the era of social media and torrent sites, yet she writes for classical, printed media. She pointed out how cultural commentary, from literature to film, has been amateurised through open platforms, where virality often outpaces insight. New voices emerge from YouTube, TikTok, or podcasting ecosystems, some thoughtful, others merely loud.

From my own position, working across the transnational European field of film criticism, I reflected on the tension between professional independence and the promotional function our work often ends up serving. In smaller national ecosystems, where cultural production and criticism are tightly entangled, this balance becomes even more precarious. With blockbusters occupying most of the space, the weakened arthouse sector increasingly relies on critical visibility as a form of survival.

The second contradiction is the collision between personal presence and the stance of expertise. In today’s attention economy, a single captioned photo may reach farther than a two-thousand-word review. The critic is no longer just a thinker, but a digital subject, curating, distributing, self-representing, and surviving, all while being read less. The intellectual becomes logistical. In this context, the question is no longer “What do you think?” but “Will you be seen thinking?” The result is not necessarily chaos, as Hana insisted, but a change in the rules of relevance.

While talking about relevance in an attention economy, our attention turned to language. English remains the lingua franca of international reception; the global canon is being edited from a narrow linguistic corridor, but in doing so, it flattens perspective. As Samardžija pointed out, many important films are assessed globally via criticism written solely in English, often from cultural positions distant from the film’s context. Critical voices from Eastern Europe, Asia, or the Global South are often absent from global film discourse, not because they lack insight, but because they lack amplification.

Pavičić reflected on the paradoxes of influence in today’s critical landscape. In the arthouse circuit, especially for films considered for festivals like Cinehill, global reception is often shaped by a handful of trade publications such as Screen, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. Within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of a film’s premiere at a major festival, its critical fate may already be sealed. This oligopoly of filtering creates a blind spot where local critics become irreplaceable, particularly when it comes to films rooted in our own cultural context, works that global trades often overlook.

He made a call for expanding the scope of film criticism itself. He argued that critics should write about Spider-Man with the same intellectual curiosity they apply to Sokurov or Loznitsa. At present, he said, there is a noticeable gap—it is easier to find smart writing about arthouse cinema than a thoughtful piece on Marvel films. Much of the existing criticism of popular cinema either avoids serious engagement or becomes an extension of marketing. Yet a meaningful, well-informed, and questioning piece about Spider-Man may be more needed in today’s public discourse than yet another celebration of the arthouse.

Beneath these contradictions lies a deeper layer: the question of labour. The critic today performs multiple roles, often unpaid or underpaid, scattered across platforms, deadlines, and festival appearances. What was once a profession is now fragmented into gigs, contributions, collaborations, and personal projects, many of them driven more by passion than by sustainability. Tina Bernik underlined how this fragmentation affects not only visibility, but also continuity, with critics often forced to choose between precarious freelance work and adjacent, more stable cultural jobs.

Dina Pokrajac expanded the conversation toward possible solutions. Rather than mourning the loss of traditional structures, she suggested focusing on building new forms of collective infrastructure. This includes creating spaces for editorial exchange that bridge the gap between academic writing and essayistic content aimed at an interested, engaged readership, establishing fair and standardised fees, and fostering horizontal collaboration between critics, curators, and institutions, as well as building transnational and regional networks.

Everyone agreed: film criticism must reinvent itself, not only aesthetically or technologically, but also politically. Its role reaches beyond the ecosystem of the film industry. It carries a social function, shaping discourse, reflecting values, and holding images accountable. New formats, from reels to video essays, might serve not as obstacles but as bridges. If adequately supported, young critics could learn to walk the line between accessibility and depth, between presence and perspective. The political and social relevance of criticism can, in fact, be traced in real time: mirrored in the movement of our audience on the spot. What began as a modest gathering, with only a few listeners, gradually grew into a full, engaged audience that stayed for the entire ninety-minute panel.

FIPRESCI represents the idea that film is worth engaging with beyond the marketing pitch, that there is value in the long take, the overlooked premiere, the risky debut. And that some of us are still willing to fight for that space, one caption, one panel, one piece at a time.

As one speaker remarked: the critic may no longer be a priest of culture, but is still a witness. And the witness matters.

Ana Stanić
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025