I do not know about you, but I love stories. As a resident of Englishland, I know the power that lies in words, and when individual threads are woven together, it gives rise to a tapestry which can be anything - beautiful, rich, striking, ugly, stark - and on top of that, edible. By edible, I mean the tapestry becomes an idea that you can process in your head like ugali in your mouth and make a decision whether it will continue its journey into your soul or go back outside quickly. This tapestry has the power to change lives and influence the world or lie bland and whither like a dusty spider web.
I have grown up to regard films as a form of literature. They contain elements of classical oral literature - being plays, also having elements of essays, poems, music and other types of literature, and most of all, combining these with art in the form of drawings and scenes and music, and with other disciplines like engineering and medicine and animal husbandry, and with elements of artistic freedom in literature such as hyperbole and parables and imagery and onomatopoeia among other things to make us see what this person is telling us.
The results are usually beautiful.
However, as the author of Memoirs of a Superfluous Man once said, "Bad money drives out good money." Movies are no exception.
With the rise to power of feminism, wokeness, Chinese nationality, overt and subvert subversion of freedoms of speech and expression and AI, movies and series are becoming blander and blander and you can almost predict the storyline for all films that will be released in a given market in the coming years.
Common themes include, "we are the good guys killing the bad guys who are Chinese or American or Muslim or Indian3", "two people meet and love each other and encounter insurmountable odds over which their love triumphs in the end", "grass to grace", "grace to grass"1, people overcoming obstacles imposed by nature or culture to achieve a dream2 and so on.
Anyway, to business. You want to watch a movie you will enjoy, which means it will engage your mind, make you feel good and not be a complete waste of your time. I like cartoons and animations (not exclusively) and some of those I enjoyed when younger absolutely pissed me off when I started watching them but because I was idle and had nothing else going on, they grew on me. Two of them were 'The Marvellous Adventures of Flapjack' and 'Best Ed'. Now that I am older, you piss me off, I turn you off. Quickly.
So how do you choose a good movie?
First, you have to know what type of story you like, for example, horror movies or action movies or Swedish movies or comedies or dramas or documentaries or nonfiction or fiction, etc. This might require that first you watch a few so your palate can decide what is best for it.
Second, decide whether you like movies or series, and in those, long ones or short ones. This criterion and the preceding one tend to be subsets of each other a lot.
Third, decide what kinds of characters you like.
Fourth, choose an actor you like and watch their movies. This is probably the most reliable indicator since, unlike music from the same musician, your favourite actor is your favourite for reasons that make sense to you - badass, funny, surprising, relatable, kind among others or maybe they and their roles are generally just perfect for each other, like Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow for example.
Fifth, select a director you like, because he is the person whose imagination brings everything together to make a seamless whole. Personally, I would watch any Quentin Tarantino movie any day, any time.
Sixth, watch the trailers for movies you are not sure about but be careful with these; sometimes the trailer may have scenes or stories that are not in the movie and are meant to entice you, carrying you like some sort of fool in the process.
Lastly, look at the movie title. These carry a lot of messages, such as the philosophy behind the filming of a movie. For instance, Black Panther was a good movie for me to watch but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sounds like its owners decided to lazily copy-paste the Twitter trends and change the entire creative direction of the film. My point? Do not be afraid to discriminate; it is your time and money which will go to waste if you are not keen about these things.
At the end of the day, the taste buds are yours.
I forgot something. Alright, I never thought about it in the first place. This metric is the movie studio making the movie. This is also a fairly reliable measure you can use when choosing a movie. Why? Because different studios have different styles and types of movies they can play, plus different amounts of tolerance for creative freedom and different amounts of money.
They also have different moral and political leanings which is important when telling stories because they are powerful modifiers, especially with the desire of film studios to be politically correct so they can get customers for their watered-down bullshit.