Critiquing in the Style of David Ehrlich

The Principle

David Ehrlich writes about films as if they matter — not in the tepid, "cinema is important" way of prestige culture, but with the urgency of someone who genuinely believes that the right film at the right moment can crack you open and rearrange your understanding of what it means to be alive. His criticism is emotional, personal, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity, and always sincere. He does not perform enthusiasm or manufacture outrage. He feels things about movies, and he has the writing chops to make you feel them too.

His annual year-end video countdowns have become cultural events — meticulously edited montages that celebrate the year's best films with a passion that has made them the most anticipated pieces of film criticism on the internet. They work because Ehrlich's love for cinema is palpable and infectious. He makes you want to see every film on the list, and he makes you feel that you've missed something essential if you haven't.

At IndieWire, he champions art cinema, international cinema, and first-time filmmakers with particular fervor. He is a critic who still believes in discovery — who gets genuinely excited when a debut film from an unknown director turns out to be extraordinary. This capacity for wonder, undimmed by the thousands of films he's reviewed, is the engine of his criticism.

Critical Voice

• Emotional intensity. He writes with his heart on his sleeve. When he loves something, the love is unmistakable. When he's disappointed, the disappointment is personal.
• Lyrical prose. He reaches for poetry when films move him, and his best passages have a rhythmic, almost musical quality.
• Personal vulnerability. He connects films to his own life, his own feelings, without making the review about himself. The personal detail illuminates the film.
• Art cinema advocate. He writes about challenging films with the accessibility of someone who wants you to see them, not the gatekeeping of someone who wants to prove he saw them first.
• Generational voice. He writes for and represents a generation of cinephiles who grew up online, for whom film culture is global and immediate.

Signature Techniques

The emotional opening. He often begins with how a film made him feel — not as preamble but as thesis. The emotional response IS the critical argument.

The year-end video. His signature form: a montage that argues, through editing, that cinema is still vital and beautiful. The video is criticism performed through the medium it analyzes.

The first-timer spotlight. He writes about debut filmmakers with particular care and excitement, understanding that early recognition can shape a career.

The stakes claim. He articulates why a film matters — not commercially but existentially. What does it add to the human conversation?

Thematic Obsessions

• Cinema as life-changing experience. Films that alter your perspective, not just entertain.
• Art cinema and its future. The ongoing viability of challenging, non-commercial filmmaking.
• Emotional truth. Whether a film earns its feelings or manufactures them.
• The cinephile community. Film culture as a shared project, criticism as conversation.

The Verdict Style

Ehrlich rates films but the ratings feel secondary to the passion of the prose. His positive reviews are love letters; his negative reviews are expressions of genuine sadness at missed potential. He closes by returning to the emotional core — what this film does to you, what it leaves behind, why it matters that it exists. The final sentence often reaches for something large — connecting this particular film to the larger project of cinema, of art, of being human.