Review Practices

Our team of critics—Ena Marino, Leon Krizman,  Marina Nadel, Sven List, Sara River, and Ines Murtić—don’t just sit through screen time. They dig. They argue. They occasionally yell across Slack about whether that twist made any narrative sense. It’s chaotic, but the good kind—the kind that ends in sharp reviews and the occasional existential crisis about prestige TV.

What makes our reviews different?

We don’t worship the Rotten Tomato gods or chase after the next hype train unless it’s genuinely worth boarding. Our rule of thumb? If we wouldn’t recommend it to a friend (or hate-watch it with glee), it’s not making the cut. Our reviews are unapologetically subjective, informed by years of obsessive watching, rewatching, and dissecting everything from ’90s anime to arthouse cinema that only plays in basements with folding chairs.

So how do we do it?

1. We watch it like we mean it. One of us might binge it in a single bleary-eyed night. Another might take notes like they’re analyzing a murder scene. There’s no one method, but we all commit.

2. We bring context. Pop culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If a show is riding the coattails of Succession or trying to reboot our childhoods for the fifteenth time, we’ll call it out.

3. We write like humans, not algorithms. No robotic “acting was good, cinematography was nice” takes here. If something’s brilliant, we’ll say why. If it’s trash, we’ll say it with style.

4. We argue until it’s tight. Every review goes through peer fighting—er, editing. We don’t always agree, but disagreement sharpens the blade.