The movie needs to engage me to the point where I forget what is going on in my life outside the cinema.
The characters need to be written in a way where I can understand their choices and actions as being consistent with who they are. I may not have made the same choices, but I need to believe THEY made the choice they would have made.
The story needs an emotional arc. I need to care about the characters and what happens, otherwise why bother? I may not like the characters, but I should be curious to know what happens to them.
That's a great and clear response, thanks Chris. Those three elements make perfect sense to me and I'll be thinking about these when I'm watching movies going forward. By the way, a point tangentially related to this is we started watching Dark (the Netflix Original German series) a few weeks back and we're hooked. It's the most complicated thing I've ever watched, but it's absolutely brilliant. It's got 3 seasons, would highly recommend it!
Three things:
The movie needs to engage me to the point where I forget what is going on in my life outside the cinema.
The characters need to be written in a way where I can understand their choices and actions as being consistent with who they are. I may not have made the same choices, but I need to believe THEY made the choice they would have made.
The story needs an emotional arc. I need to care about the characters and what happens, otherwise why bother? I may not like the characters, but I should be curious to know what happens to them.
That's a great and clear response, thanks Chris. Those three elements make perfect sense to me and I'll be thinking about these when I'm watching movies going forward. By the way, a point tangentially related to this is we started watching Dark (the Netflix Original German series) a few weeks back and we're hooked. It's the most complicated thing I've ever watched, but it's absolutely brilliant. It's got 3 seasons, would highly recommend it!