Star power ... a scene from Haneke's Caché
The traditional way for a film critic to praise a movie goes as follows. Spread a thin layer of stylishly sophisticated sarcasm over the majority of releases; then, when the occasion demands, a timely moment of modest praise will jump off the page like a five-minute standing ovation, alerting the reader that something really special is going on in their local cinema.
To this time-honoured practice, the relatively recent trend of prefacing reviews with star ratings has been, by and large, a mere ornamental index, writes Guy Dammann. But now it looks as if the superciliousness standard could become as out-dated as the former monetary practice of anchoring currency to gold stocks, for clearly super inflation has taken hold. In this week's issue, Time Out has given a total of six stars to Hidden, Michael Haneke's newly-released film starring Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche.
So six is to be the new five when it comes to star ratings. Accordingly, because six out of five would be pure numerical nonsense, Time Out now rates all its films out of six. Apparently the rationale behind this Spinal Tap approach (as one of my colleagues put it) to film reviewing is that the previous five-star max was over-used and the currency in sore need of devaluing.
A "prudent" move? I suppose it is Time Out's prerogative to use whatever rating system it likes, but the decision to do so on the grounds that it is no longer "accurate" is ridiculous. It is ridiculous not so much because it is rather pretentious - although, clearly, it is that too - but rather because it gives far too much credence to a practice never intended to be more than a helpful guide for readers given either to haste or illiteracy. Surely the evaluative burden in a film review lies in what the reviewer writes, and if you want to say you think a film is "really exceptional", whether the superciliousness standard is applied or not, surely the best thing is to spend a couple of paragraphs convincing the reader that it is so? And if your critic's nib isn't sufficiently sharp to do this, perhaps it's time to take some time out.
