I went to university with a bloke I had a tremendous amount of respect for on an intellectual level. It wasn’t about politics – it was his way of analysing art, particularly film. He had an uncanny ability for spotting things I completely missed, even though I had studied Screen across both TAFE and Uni. He could effortlessly deconstruct the literary techniques at play, pinpointing how themes and ideals were layered through character, setting and subtext.

At times, I thought his critiques were completely over the top – reading profound meaning into something that surely wasn’t there. But then came the moments where it clicked, and suddenly I would notice those exact same storytelling beats and visual motifs because of our conversations.

A year down the track while studying journalism, I launched a website called News Reborn. Mostly, it featured rehashed media releases and curated news, but a popular section was dedicated to reviews: films, video games, music and TV shows. Naturally, I asked this mate if he wanted to come on board as a contributor, and to my surprise, he said ‘Yes!’.

What followed were exhaustively detailed, intensely analytical critiques of obscure films that would usually only register on the radar of someone grinding through a PhD in cinema studies. From my perspective, though, it was great content. It gave our small site an air of legitimacy, proving we had writers who genuinely understood the film medium. So, I published them despite of their obscurity.

However, there was one catch: my mate’s reviews could never include a simple overall score.

Every other review on the site – mostly mainstream releases handled by myself or other uni students – came stamped with a number out of ten. Slapping a 7/10 or a 3/10 on a post gave social media scrollers an immediate summary at a glance, encouraging them to click through and read the breakdown. It was benign clickbait: it delivered a quick takeaway up front to invite readers into the nuance, rather than misleading them … And it drove decent traffic as a result.

Yet my mate flatly refused to rate a movie that way. His reasoning has stuck with me ever since, and it is the exact reason I refuse to attach scores to films on this blog today.

Put simply: what people look for in a movie is never universal.

What pulls one viewer in might leave another completely disinterested. To deter someone from watching a film simply because it failed to meet a critic’s personal checklist isn’t fair, and that not what a review is – that’s just a report card. A grade achieves nothing when you aren’t actively teaching the creator how to improve, and I imagine no Hollywood director is browsing IMDb, seeing a 6/10, and scribbling down notes on areas for future professional development.

You can write a thoughtful review explaining that while the acting felt wooden, the direction was razor-sharp, the pacing deliberate, and the visual palette flowed so seamlessly with the narrative that it elevated the entire story to another level – but if you slap a 3/10 at the end of the page, all of that depth gets washed away.

Nothing in cinema is entirely flawless. When we judge art purely on a rigid binary of “good” versus “bad”, we rob audiences of the chance to appreciate genuine greatness achieved in specific areas. Acting, scoring, cinematography, pacing, location scouting, casting – these are all distinct elements that shape a finished work. Summing up that entire ecosystem with a single digit out of 10 does a complete disservice to the medium and reader.

In a digital landscape obsessed with binary takes and hyper-divided fan cultures, we are constantly pushed to shove art into one neat box or another. But films don’t work like that. A movie can be flawed, brilliant, mediocre, and deeply memorable all at the exact same time.

I still carry this perspective whenever I sit down to watch anything. I love outright crowd-pleasers like Anchorman – which, for all intents and purposes, is hardly a masterclass in visual storytelling or dramatic restraint. I love The Muppets, which I’ve written about here before, because it’s fun and heartfelt. Engaging with cinema isn’t about sitting on a high horse and dictating what meets some arbitrary standard of perfection. It is about sharing a personal experience and offering a perspective that might enrich someone else’s viewing. That was the real value of the pieces my mate contributed back in the day.

He never told an audience whether a movie was an 8/10 or a 3/10; he gave them a way of seeing the art that they never would have had otherwise.

His reviews never pulled anywhere near the traffic of our mainstream reviews did, largely due to his esoteric taste in cinema, but that didn’t matter. Obviously, skipping the latest blockbuster assembly line in favour of tracking down obscure documentaries doesn’t do any favours with the search algorithms. But if an unscored, honest reflection of a film helps just one or two people look at a piece of cinema a little differently, my writing has done its job.