Eileen Jones’s Cinematic Life

Few film critics writing today are as educated, prolific, or funny as Dr. Eileen Jones. A co-host with Dr. Dolores McElroy of the weekly podcast Filmsuck and the author of hundreds of articles about film and TV, notably for the left-wing periodical Jacobin, she is the film critic par excellence of the “age of crap cinema”. One of the most telling tributes to her skills is the fact that she was personally invited by legendary filmmakers Joel Coen and Frances McDormand to discuss their version of Macbeth (listen to her report on the experience here!).

A couple of months ago, just before she left to attend Berlin Critics Week 2026, I interviewed her about her career as a film guru, academic, and writer. Not only did she gracefully tolerate some shocking technical glitches on my end, her off-the-cuff answers were fully as polished as her essays.

1) You sometimes mention that film has been an important part of your life since childhood. How would you characterize your relationship to film?

That’s a tough one. It’s that situation that people find themselves in who find themselves committed to anything in childhood, where you can’t believe you’re still in it decades later and you weren’t fully conscious of it happening and it was just an accomplished fact before you could do anything. Sometimes I am very startled and think, “Eileen, you gotta get outta this thing.” It’s just too late.

I started when I was very young. I was—I don’t know—I’d say by ten or twelve I was already obsessed. Very young. And I know why, I desperately needed an emotional outlet. I hated life, I hated American culture. My whole situation. I hated school, I had no haven. So I was just trying to glom onto something that would fully absorb me. And of course, I also read incessantly. Movies would grip me, you know, it was perfect escapism, so I just started obsessively watching as a child.

And even then at university, as an undergrad, I was an English major and I was going to go literary somehow, but I had a minor in Media Studies just for the pleasurable courses, which of course involved the movies. And things would seem to shove me in that direction. So I finally thought, “Why don’t I try to become a film critic?” So I thought that way young. But it’s really hard to become a film critic, especially when I come along and the profession is in its first stages of starting to collapse. It’s past its heyday and, you know, the newspaper game is starting to fade. So I started a little freelancing but I couldn’t get my foot in the door much.

So then I went to the the academy, which is the refuge of all of us misfits in society who don’t know where the hell to go—or at least it used to be, I don’t know if it still is. So I segued into that and went into grad school and did all sorts of other things. But again, it kept involving movies, movies, movies. And it just became a thing that had an inevitability about it. Long, long, later I graduated, I got a PhD, I had teaching jobs et cetera. I wound up as a film critic very belatedly. So I’m a little proud of this meandering course back to where I’d started so many years earlier.

But again, it was just a strange thing to have had it chosen by something inside me, some desperate need. And then decades later, I’d be like, “Gosh, I’m still here!”  I do occasionally just think maybe at age 67, “I’ll stop.” But I don’t know if I can stop anymore, it might not be possible.

It’s hard to imagine life without it, but it would feel very luxurious to try. We’ll see.

2) Is there a film critic whose style you admire?

This always sounds so awful. One of the reasons I wanted to become a film critic was I hated film critics. I hated what they wrote. There was no one who was working in the late ’80s and ’90s whose work I liked. I hated them all. I would’ve liked to physically attack them. Unforgiveable, so many, including the worshipped ones like Roger Ebert. I had a long-standing red-eyed rage that he became the preeminent film critic—just the mediocrity. This was a man whose reviews of early Coen Brothers and David Lynch films can never be forgiven. He didn’t get them at all. Super dismissive and just unforgiveable, unforgiveable.

I did respect past critics. And I only knew them because I did an independent study with a professor who taught a novels-into-film course—I was doing extra work with him—and he assigned me to study film critics of the past. And there were a couple that I really liked. James Agee was very good. I think it was in the Nation magazine he was allowed to be more freewheeling (he also wrote for somewhere more staid like Time), but if you read his more freewheeling things, he really got into the phenomenal, the emotional, the experiential of film. His appreciation for people like Val Lewton is fantastic because he’d not only write about how great Val Lewton horror films like Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie were, he’d write about the best audience for them. There’s a little theater in New York and he’d say, “This is the finest audience in America.” He would know. “It’s the most mixed-race cinema and they love Val Lewton and they get Lewton. And you can just tell by their responses and the knowing laugh here and you feel that they get it, this is the most brilliant, savvy audience there is.” So he would do interesting things like that that really brought the movie alive for you in a way, he was quite brilliant. So he was probably my favorite of the ones I studied.

I mean, Pauline Kael is so irritating that you can’t pick her, but you kind of have to pick her if you love genre film because she was the first to own that. She was the one to say, “Look, I don’t have to worship at the altar of every art film that comes down the pike in my direction.”  It needed to be said in the era she was writing, you know. She comes up in the late ’50s I think she started and through the ’60s and ’70s it was her era. And she liked genre film and the popular film experience. And she takes apart certain critics in a way that’s so great. She’s got this one where she’s lacing into Andrew Sarris and his auteur theory that’s hilarious and so scathing and beautiful. A lot of her early stuff is actually wonderful. Once it’s the cult of Pauline Kael, she becomes quite unbearable. She’s just a victim of her own success. But in the early days there was stuff that needed to be said, and she was kind of sharp and fearless and so she did some really great early work.

I kind of sneakingly like this guy named Manny Farber, who was an artist. This is old timey. He wrote a book called Negative Space that was kind of a cult favorite. He’s wild, man. He writes like an artist, he writes the craziest things. I still remember him writing about The Manchurian Candidate, which is a movie I love, and he writes about an action scene. He keeps talking about how geeky and weird the film is and he says, “It looks like Frank Sinatra in this scene is throwing his head at the camera.” He just has these beautiful ways of expressing the effects in films that were not like the usual film critics. You know, big downsides, like he’s kind of macho, he’s a bit of a misogynist, he talks about actresses in terms of their bodies and whether he found them hot or not. But just for the freedom, the free-thinking and the expressivity was exciting. Because what you get with most film critics is the most boring, the most middlebrow, so bland, so like they’re expecting the well-made play presented to them every time.

Anyway, my decision to be a critic was largely a reaction against critics who expect “a perfect theater piece” every time. To the point that’s even a little embarrassing to be a film critic even though I always wanted to be because it’s such a great gig.

It’s very hard but the idea was to craft my own way: “What can I do that corrects the things that matter?” And my biggest fear is to be the Clueless Wonder who pans the next, I don’t know, the next David Lynch or Coen Brothers. When the next great director comes who we’re not quite ready for, will I be the idiot? That’s when I give up film.

3) You taught film at the University of California, Berkeley and at Chapman University. But well before you left academia, you started writing about film and TV in a way that has mass appeal , combining humor and radical honesty with deep passion for and knowledge of the form. Can you talk about the transition or difference between writing academic papers and writing reviews?

I was never very good at academic writing. You were supposed to leave the ‘I’ out, which felt unnatural to me. The idea was to add to the general store of knowledge, which generally resulted in very dense, heavy, indigestible prose.

The trick with writing for a more general readership is to convert that heavy material into something lighter, something that is coherent and easier to read.

One thing that I kept doing for a long time was adding block quotes. In academic papers, you add large chunks of the script so it’s easier to analyze it. When I submitted reviews with these block quotes, the editor would go down and put a big red cross over each quote. So I had to learn to incorporate the main points through paraphrase.

And in academic writing you have to provide a source or reference for every assertion. Editors in popular magazines don’t require that. It’s enough to mention a source once or twice, or quite often fact-checking by an editor is enough.

4) Is there a film you would like to see made?

I would like to see more movies deal with what is going on around us right now. The combination of chaos and malice and stupidity. Movies help us to conceptualize what’s going on. At the moment, it’s easy to feel stunned. We are standing open-mouthed and getting hit with news item after news item, we don’t even have a name for what we’re experiencing. A movie or genre of movies that dealt with what we’re experiencing could help give it a name, a framework.

In the past, in American history, world events prompted a surge of genre films that helped create a collective understanding of what was going on. Screwball comedies, for example, couldn’t have happened without women’s suffrage in 1920. In films starring Katharine Hepburn or Carole Lombard, the Victorian woman is nowhere to be seen. Women, and society in general, is grappling with the question of how love and marriage work in a world where women have voting rights, go to work, and generally play on a more equal footing with men.

Then after World War II, despite the fact that it was a period of prosperity, there’s a surge of noir, where the characters are moving in a world, or a city that represents the world, that is completely rotten. In some cases the implication is that the cosmos itself is rotten and corrupt—there are speeches the protagonists give that actually express this. Admittedly, some of these had been suppressed during the war for patriotic reasons—there was a government directive to show only uplifting, patriotic movies.

Then you have the counter-culture films of the sixties of course. Dr. Strangelove is a great example.

I’m waiting for this surge of movies that deal with what we’re going through now—black comedy.  What has come closest to this for me is One Battle After Another, which as I wrote is practically a handbook for leftists. There is the sensei way of fighting fascism, represented by the character played by Benicio Del Toro and the wrong way, represented by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. Then you have Chase Infiniti’s character, who embodies a combination of the slow, steady, pragmatic approach of her sensei, which gradually overcomes the fears of her loving father along with the unreliable passion of her radical mother played by Teyana Taylor, so you have hope for the future.

Sean Penn’s fascist character is so much like that cartoonish ICE commander Gregory Bovino that side-by-side memes have been made out of their resemblance.

In the past, you had novels that held up a kind of mirror to society a role film could be filling. That’s why I’m such a fan of Dickens. He said, “Here is the workhouse orphan, here is the chimney sweep, here’s the petty thief, here’s the greedy capitalist. I’ve met all of you and now here you are.”

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Hosts Eileen Jones and Dolores McElroy talk contemporary film and TV with energy, rigor, and wit (and the occasional vehement disagreement), and Eileen publishes a weekly essay on a wide variety of film-related topics.