On Letterboxd, Everyone’s a Critic

This week, cinema’s most esteemed critics descend upon the French Riviera to attend the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where they will render judgement on 22 carefully selected films competing for the Palme d’Or. Later, some 17 million Letterboxd users will file their own verdicts, fighting their way to the top of the feed armed with witty one-liners. 

For some time now, the two camps have been pitted against one another in a bid to determine who holds ultimate authority in the realm of film criticism. On one side, traditional critics lament the art form’s decline into amateur reviewing; on the other, Internet devotees denigrate those critics as antiquated and elitist, and cast themselves as the new arbiters of taste.

Letterboxd, cinema’s platform du jour, has become a flash point of the debate. Launched in 2013, it slotted neatly into a digital landscape that was already democratising film criticism. Anyone and everyone can play the role of critic on Letterboxd, where any review can rise to the top so long as it’s punchy enough. But whether the platform is truly to blame for the decline of professional film criticism is far from certain.

The deteriorating health of the profession has become indisputable in the face of routine media layoffs. Last year, Vanity Fair scaled back some coverage, which involved firing its chief film critic and two Hollywood correspondents. The Chicago Tribune followed suit in August, getting rid not only of longstanding critic Michael Phillips, but of the position of film critic entirely. The golden era of criticism is lost to the past of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif, reviews which endure only as archaeological evidence of the reigning power critics once held over the box office. 

Serge Kaganski, a renowned French film critic, reflects on the shift with the discernment of a seasoned expert who entered the landscape in 1986: “With the Internet, everything changed: critics lost parts of their influence and their expert status, the line blurred between professional and amateur criticism.” The issue is one of oversaturation and speed: “Now, every receiver in the global audience is a potential broadcaster themself,” he says. “All this creates a breakneck speed: we have to digest hundreds, thousands of news, images, texts, everyday. We have no time to digest.” 

Letterboxd appeals precisely because it lets anyone broadcast. Yet the amateur critical impulse is hardly new. Kaganski reaches for a quote from critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut to make the point: “Everybody has two jobs: their own, and film critic.” Letterboxd simply gave this impulse infrastructure. Still, its open-ended format lends itself to sardonic quips that sometimes eclipses the more contemplative writing beneath them. The top review under Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning One Battle After Another (2025) reads: “Sean Penn delivers one of the weirdest walks of all time. An Oscar worthy weird guy walk.” For Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026): “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” It seems fair, then, to question whether such a format can sustain genuinely critical engagement with film. 

David Ehrlich, head critic at IndieWire and one of Letterboxd’s most-followed users, with over 200,000 followers, does not see the two as mutually exclusive. “I don’t think that the fact that people are writing one-line jokey reviews on Letterboxd is what’s causing all of these journalists and critics to lose their jobs,” he says. Ehrlich remains positive the appetite for professional criticism endures, despite the ubiquity of the self-professed critic. “People are so hungry for criticism,” he says, “The appetite for smart, engaging criticism has never been more pronounced.” He imagines showing a critic 40 years ago how rabidly their work would be consumed today. “They would be over the moon. They would be like, ‘I can’t believe that there are these generations of hyper-engaged people who want to know what you have to say about a new Ryusuke Hamaguchi movie.’”

Mattias Frey, author of The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism, disputes the idea that the democratisation of criticism correlates to a rise in anti-intellectualism. Anxiety about the dumbing-down of cultural discourse, Frey argues, is a longstanding tenet of the profession, rather than a recent development. 

The real evil of the media landscape today, as Ehrlich understands it, lies in the market’s refusal to acknowledge the value in film criticism. “The VCs, the private equity firms that come in and dilute the various outlets to nothing, they just don’t want to do the work to find the model,” he says. Professional film criticism keeps failing to recalibrate itself to this vibrant cinephile renaissance and instead grows more precarious, he suggests. 

The critic, at their best, is a liaison: between the opaque and the unreachable, and the reader who cannot find the words for it. The work demands a specific language, one capable of conveying what operates beneath the surface of a film. That language is not guaranteed to be found on Letterboxd. And yet its ability to rehabilitate films that were originally left for dead by critics should not be underestimated. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, once ridiculed as a fancy-dress pastiche at the Cannes Film Festival 20 years ago, has achieved cult status on Letterboxd. “Let the art department eat ALL the cake,” one review praises.  

A unicorn in the social media space, Letterboxd has struck a sweet spot in connecting users without driving them into spiralling feuds. The absence of algorithmic scrolling and relative lack of monetisation (the site serves users small, third-party ads) insulate it from many of the sins of its peers. There is little reward – beyond minor validation – for grandstanding or posting incendiary content. This modesty is precisely what demarcates Letterboxd from the clickbait-infected corners of the web, and what clears a space for genuine engagement with film. The 2021 launch of the Journal – a full editorial arm dedicated to long-form features and cultural deep-dives – indicates that Letterboxd itself understands that the appetite for the one-liner and the appetite for considered criticism are not mutually exclusive. (Letterboxd did not respond to a list of questions sent by email in time for publication.)

The fear that this could change is becoming increasingly realistic as, according to an article by Semafor, controlling investor Tiny is currently courting new potential buyers. Its own acquisition in 2023 was little more than a formality of ownership; there is no guarantee the next owner will be as restrained. The search comes at a crucial point in the platform’s maturity, where it could evolve from a modest network into something much larger – and far less recognisable. “It would be a real cause for concern if Letterboxd disappeared one day,” Ehrlich says, “I don’t know where that energy would go. I don’t know if it would be able to regroup somewhere else.”