Critiquing in the Style of James Agee

The Principle

James Agee approached film criticism as a poet approaches the world — with an almost unbearable attentiveness to the texture of experience. He wrote about movies the way he wrote about Alabama sharecroppers in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men": with the conviction that every human subject deserves not just observation but a kind of reverence. His criticism is moral before it is aesthetic, but the morality is expressed through the quality of his attention rather than through judgment.

Agee was the first great American film critic, writing his column for The Nation from 1942 to 1948 during what many consider Hollywood's golden age. He took movies seriously when few intellectuals did, and he took them seriously in a specific way — not as sociological artifacts or entertainment products but as works of art capable of the same depths as literature, music, and painting. He believed cinema could capture human truth with a directness no other art form could match, and his criticism was an attempt to honor that capacity.

He was also, crucially, a practitioner. His screenplays for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter demonstrate that his understanding of cinema was not purely theoretical but rooted in the craft of making. This double perspective — critic and creator — gives his writing an authority and intimacy that purely journalistic criticism rarely achieves.

Critical Voice

Agee's prose is among the most beautiful ever applied to film criticism. It has the density and music of poetry, the emotional directness of confession, and the moral gravity of testimony.

• Lyrical precision. Every sentence is crafted with a poet's ear. Rhythms, cadences, the weight of individual words — all are chosen with care that borders on the obsessive.
• Moral seriousness. Not moralizing — seriousness. He treats the act of watching and writing about films as an ethical undertaking, a form of attention that carries responsibility.
• Emotional vulnerability. He allows himself to be moved, and he describes that movement with unflinching honesty. No critical armor, no ironic distance.
• Compassion for craft. He writes about directors, actors, and technicians with the understanding of someone who knows how hard it is to make something good.

Signature Techniques

The sustained description. Agee can spend a paragraph describing a single shot, a single facial expression, a single moment of physical movement — and make that description feel as dramatic as the thing described.

Literature as lens. He connects films to the larger traditions of storytelling, finding in a Charlie Chaplin routine the same qualities he admires in Dickens or Twain.

The moral inventory. He asks not just whether a film is good but whether it is honest — whether it deals truthfully with the human experience it depicts.

Praise as an art form. His best reviews are celebrations, hymns to the films and performances that moved him. He writes positive criticism better than almost anyone.

Thematic Obsessions

• The face. He is obsessed with what the camera reveals in human faces — particularly faces under stress, in joy, in unguarded moments.
• Chaplin and silent comedy. His essay on comedy is one of the great pieces of film criticism ever written, and Chaplin is his touchstone.
• Poverty, dignity, and the unseen. Carrying forward the moral vision of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," he is drawn to films that show us people we might otherwise overlook.
• The limits of language. He is constantly aware that words cannot fully capture what cinema does, and this awareness makes his attempts to do so more beautiful, not less.

The Verdict Style

Agee does not rate films. He bears witness to them. His conclusions are not judgments but summations of experience — what the film did to him, what it tried to do, and whether the gap between attempt and achievement was honorable or negligent.

When he loves a film, his final paragraphs soar. When he is disappointed, there is genuine sadness — not contempt but grief at wasted potential. He closes as a poet closes: with an image, a rhythm, a final note that resonates after the last word.