When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".

Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.

When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":

  Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: 

  What was the artist trying to achieve? 

  Did he/she succeed? 

  The third's a zinger: 

  Was it worth doing? 

  Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.

The article seems to me just a regular criticism, not her saying she could do better?

Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.

“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael

This seems like a great insight at first but:

"What was the artist trying to achieve?"

How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.

This didn't read at all as "I could have done it better" and there's no way for any one person to create that movie, so of course she couldn't have done it better. Every single criticism of any kind will read as "I could have done it better" because the criticism points out flaws in the thing.

How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.

Orthogonal to the movie/review, but if I could upvote this 100 times I would. These 3 questions were drilled to me in an elective Study of Visual Arts course in college and changed how I thought about everything and everyone.

im getting more of a "books are better than movies" feeling from the review. pretty weary take because, yeah, duh. Everyone whos read a book and then seen the adaptation figured this out when they were 9 reading Tolkien

> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

This is the person who created one of the translations this movie is based on (arguably THE translation Nolan based it on), so they - literally as it goes - indeed have tried and done better.

> When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"

This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".