To Review, or Not to Review

Well before it earned eight Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, I went to see Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet at the Cineplex Varsity in downtown Toronto. Just over two hours later, I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Hardly anyone in the small auditorium spoke as the credits began to roll. The story of William Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, whose death in 1596 supposedly inspired Hamlet, had ripped all our hearts out.

I mentioned the audience’s reaction to a friend the next morning, and he said he’d try to see the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel from 2020, published in Canada as Hamnet & Judith. Before he got around to it, the movie won two Golden Globes, having been up for a total of six, and was named one of the top ten productions of 2025 by the American Film Institute. Yet it turns out he didn’t particularly care for this darling of Hollywood’s awards season. “Definitely emotional,” he texted me the other day, “but not sure I liked it.”

To better understand my friend’s ambivalence, I did what I often do after I’ve seen a movie but rarely before: I read the reviews. “Hamnet Fails Shakespeare,” a New Statesman headline declared. “The film is a prime example of the very 21st-century idea of art as autobiography, literature as consolation,” its critic wrote. “One can almost hear the therapist’s couch creak beneath the weight of so much symbolic transference.” The BBC was equally unimpressed, describing the movie as ruthlessly manipulative: “no more profound or authentic than any other costume drama set in ye olde days.” Then there was Justin Chang in The New Yorker, whose trenchant commentary I’ve been enjoying since Anthony Lane gave up the film beat in 2024. “The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next,” Chang complained. “What is ‘Hamnet,’ or ‘Hamlet,’ without a little ham?”

What I love about film criticism — beyond the perfectly deployed wordplay — is the opportunity it provides to reflect on my own surface reactions, which tend to be less nitpicky and more laudatory. I go to the theatre to forget about work and whatever ridiculous thing Donald Trump has just said. When I come back to reality, I appreciate the chance to unpack a film’s stylistic and technical achievements — or failings — even if I don’t ultimately agree with a well-trained eye.

While I mostly wade through reviews of movies I’ve already seen, the opposite is true with book reviews, which I generally turn to first (if not solely). I frequently pore over the recently redesigned Times Literary Supplement at lunch, and I regularly dip in and out of both the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. Most weekends, I spend hours with the stand-alone New York Times book section, though after I’ve finished what are usually smarter takes in the Wall Street Journal. Until a month ago, I did the same with the Washington Post.

It’s galling, of course, that an iconic newspaper owned by a billionaire who first struck gold selling books online would shutter its well-regarded review section — part of a sweeping layoff at the Post in February. But it’s also emblematic of our algorithmic age, where confirmation bias is coded everywhere we look, from our Amazon search results to our newsfeeds. We are bloated with information, but we are starving for serendipity.

I didn’t intend to read Michael Wood’s TLS review of David Woodman’s The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, but I found it fascinating once I started almost by accident. I didn’t realize that Paul L. Hedren had published Sitting Bull’s War: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains until Peter Cozzens wrote about it in the WSJ, prompting me to order a copy from my local bookstore. It was the Times that first drew my attention to Karen Russell’s The Antidote, which I intend to finally read on a beach very soon.

As my discerning friend’s reaction to Hamnet reminds me, so‑called discoverability is only half the story when it comes to a thoughtful review, which has the power to make someone like me (and, I suspect, many of you) not a better consumer but a better, less passive participant in the world of letters or film or thought.

I will still root for Hamnet when the Oscars are handed out in mid-March, even if I can now concede that, arguably, it is little more than “highly effective grief porn.” That’s the thing about reviews. They’re often most valuable when they allow a reader to hold on to contradictory reactions — to a film that is both artful and middling, to a novel that is both wonderful and forgettable, to a history that is both niche and necessary. Jeff Bezos may be the fourth-richest person in the world, but he’s impoverished if he cannot appreciate that.