MUMBAI: If film criticism ever needed a reality check, Goa delivered one with the force of a director’s clapboard. At the 56th International Film Festival of India, a masterclass titled Beyond the Thumb – The Role of a Film Critic: A Gate Keeper, An Influencer or Something Else? turned into a sharp, spirited dissection of what it means to judge films in an era where everyone with a phone camera believes they’ve earned the right to declare something “the best ever” or “WTF”.

The session brought together Barbara Lorey de Lacharrière, Deepa Gahlot, Meghachandra Kongbam, Elizabeth Kerr, Baradwaj Rangan and Sudhir Srinivasan, with Davide Abbatescianni moderating, a line-up that offered more nuance than any star-rating system can handle.

Meghachandra Kongbam began by stressing the need to build appreciation, not noise. “Everyone is a critic now,” he noted, observing how unfiltered commentary often masquerades as informed judgement. He argued that workshops and education must become central to Indian film discourse because without understanding the language of cinema, the loudest voices risk drowning out the most meaningful ones.

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From there, Baradwaj Rangan set the conversation ablaze with a subject few critics willingly tackle branding. In India, he said, employability often depends on the voice you’ve built and the trust you’ve earned. Like television anchors who draw followings not just for news, but personality, critics too accrue an identity over time. And that need not be a dirty word. “If your voice remains consistent,” he said, “and your criticism honest, the brand that forms around you is simply a by-product not a compromise.”

Sudhir Srinivasan agreed, arguing that identity isn’t vanity; it’s circulation. “Big organisations have machinery,” he said. “Individuals only have their voice.” And with that voice, he added, comes the responsibility of provoking thought rather than smothering it. For him, the ideal critic unsettles complacency not by imposing taste, but by sparking a dialogue in the reader’s mind.

When the conversation shifted to the generational churn in film criticism, Rangan was blunt: the fundamentals haven’t changed. Most serious critics still assess the same thing whether the film achieves what it sets out to do. But the content ecosystem around them has mutated wildly. Sensationalist thumbnails, exaggerated titles, and hyperbolic instant reactions have replaced measured reflection. “Everything is hysteria,” he said, adding that younger audiences often engage not with the review itself but with their own imagined version of it. The space for disagreement has shrunk; the appetite for argument has grown.

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Elizabeth Kerr took the baton with humour and clarity. Transparency, she argued, is the critic’s North Star. Not objectivity because that does not exist but openness about one’s own perspective. To her, the most valuable review is one that reveals not just what the critic sees in the film, but where the critic stands while seeing it. Whether it is a queer romance from Hong Kong or a village drama from India, the critic’s task is not to mirror identity but to understand universality. “You don’t have to be those characters,” she said. “You just have to be open enough for the film to speak to you.”

Deepa Gahlot echoed this, adding that every film good or bad contains something worth noticing. The artistry of even a flawed work deserves acknowledgement. The role of the critic, she insisted, is not to moralise, nor to decide whether a film should exist, nor to judge its “usefulness”. Instead, it is to examine how well it expresses what it intends to. Violence, for instance, cannot be condemned in a vacuum; in Kill Bill, inventiveness is the point. The critic’s job is to evaluate craftsmanship, not to act as a cultural gatekeeper guarding society’s moral code.

Srinivasan returned to this theme with a warning against monocular criticism, especially criticism shaped solely through ideological lenses. He noted that films are increasingly being dismissed for a single “wrong” element, while their technical, emotional, or structural achievements are ignored. Specialists who write from feminist, caste, political or sociological perspectives play a vital role, he clarified but when such lenses dominate all discourse, they risk reducing cinema to a single checkbox.

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Rangan, drawing from years of navigating audiences who demand a yes/no verdict, emphasised what he calls “subjective objectivity,” the attempt to root one’s personal taste within a rational framework. Ultimately, he said, readers must find their tribe: critics who watch films the way they do, who share their cinematic instincts. “This is a subjective profession,” he reminded. “Find the voices that resonate with your view of cinema.”

Barbara Lorey de Lacharrière’s reflections offered a gentle counterpoint. Critics, she said, are not arbiters but interpreters conduits between filmmaker and audience. What matters is sincerity: the filmmaker’s sincerity in telling a story, and the critic’s sincerity in receiving and reflecting it. A critic may dislike a film, she reminded the room, but they must always try to understand the desire that created it.

The masterclass closed the way great conversations do not with answers, but with apertures. No one, it turned out, believed in the old labels anymore. The critic is not a gatekeeper, not merely an influencer, and certainly not a subscriber-counting entertainer. Instead, as the panel collectively shaped it, the critic is a thinker, a translator, an irritant, a companion, a challenger, and sometimes, simply, a mirror held up to the cinema and its moment.

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In an age where the loudest thumb rules the algorithm, this reminder felt like a breath of fresh air: criticism is not about noise, but nuance. And nuance, as Goa discovered, still has an audience.

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