Disclaimer – Surprisingly enough, this is my opinion.

I’ve been meaning to write this article for about two years now. I was going to make a YouTube video about it back when my channel was still active but I never found the time. Now that I have a platform where I can finally write this, I’m really glad.

The interest in writing this article recently re-surged as a couple friends came and asked me “Why did you like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so much? I didn’t get it. What was the point of that movie?”. At first I wanted to vehemently defend this movie which I thought was an exceptional film. But soon my mind filled with a different perspective after which I reluctantly said “It’s not for everyone.”

I find that sentence to be really interesting. What does that mean? This brings me back to a set of polls I did on Instagram back in the end of 2018. I got about 75 votes on each poll and the gist was to choose which was the best movie of the year. According to this sample set of people, Avengers : Infinity War was the best movie of 2018. This shocked me. I’ll admit it, 2018 was not a great year for film but Infinity War? Seriously? In the same year that movies like The Favourite, Roma, BlacKKKlansman came out. And then I realized that most people probably haven’t watched or even heard of those movies. This is actually what inspired me to start reviewing movies, to get the word out there about some movies that would generally go under the mainstream radar.

Now there’s no rule that if a film has high artistic value, it cannot be extremely entertaining and popular. Take classics like Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather or most recently Knives Out! which was critically acclaimed and did really well at the box-office for an original work. But more often than not, films which are really abstract or have a learning curve to understand the artistic value of, is often unappreciated or ignored. A famous example of this is Academy Award for Best Picture 2018 winner The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro. This has been widely dubbed as ‘boring’ or ‘the fish-s*x movie’ by most common audiences, most of whom haven’t even watched the movie. Or Call Me By Your Name from the same year which was very slow and boring for me on first viewing but when I revisited it a year later and much more literate in film I found it to be an extremely engrossing watch.