I feel like I should address this question because I get it all the time. Granted, this is probably to be expected. After all, when you watch films for a living people want to know what they should see. Here's the thing: I don't really look forward to watching any movie. At least, I don't lie awake at night counting down the days to when a particular movie is coming out. It just doesn't happen. When you are a film critic you are seeing several movies a week sometimes. I've mentioned this before, but I mention it again because this makes it almost impossible to anticipate the release of anything. Seriously, it is. Every week I'm watching action movies, dramas, stuff for kids that I doubt kids themselves would actually watch, but there I am watching it and taking notes to write a review no child is ever going to read.
When it comes to anticipating movies critics tend to run by a different set of criteria. We are not swayed much with franchises, sequels are more of a bane to us because we feel like we are writing the same review sometimes, and we try not o watch previews because marketing campaigns don't sway us. Personally, I tend to get excited about a film if it's being directed by a director I am a fan of. Disney and Pixar animated films tend to be events for me, so those I admit to looking forward to. And I'm sure the closer we get to the release of the new Star Wars movie the more I will get excited despite being disappointed in two of the last four movies we got (yes folks, I am counting the Clone Wars animated movie). Otherwise, no, I'm not looking forward to seeing a whole lot. This is a job, and there's always work to do without looking forward to doing more.
While I'm at it, let's tackle the other question that I consider to be the sister question to the one listed above: What's coming out that's good? For the most part this is a bad question and I'll tell you why. The reason this is a bad question is because unless I've seen the movie I can't tell you. This is another reason critics don't like previews: They can convince you that you are getting a better product than you actually are. In fact, I'm going to stop here because I think previews deserves it's own post, so we'll tackle that in a week or two.
