Now more than ever, our collective attentions are stretched in a multitude of directions. The pace of information exchange quickens and we feel the need to know for sure if it’s worth spending our time on that new thing we don’t know much about when we could be enjoying that other thing we probably will enjoy.

This is where I feel that the intersection of critic and reader lies.

It takes someone a few minutes to read through a review of a movie that’s hours long, or dodge a restaurant that has an abysmal atmosphere. The critic can give the public an idea of what they’re spending their hard-earned time on at the small expense of reading the review.

To that end, anything that gives the reader what they need to make the decision is what should be prioritized in a critic’s work. A review doesn’t have to be as short as possible to accomplish this goal, of course; we’re not machines taking in data and spitting out our decisions as efficiently as possible. If a review is unapproachable, the public hasn’t been served and the writing helps nobody – doubly so for having wasted the critic’s own time in creating the review.

At the end of the day, consumers are expected to give more and more time to our consumptions. “Endgame” is three hours long, for goodness sake. With only so much time in the day and the bottomless well of available content only getting deeper, the modern critic is a sort of chronographical sacrificial lamb, using their own time so you might not waste yours.