When I was a kid, I didn’t understand how grown-ups thought about movies. To me, the draw of a movie was pretty simple. What’s it about? What’s the story? Who are the characters? Where do they go? What’s the lesson?

Grown-ups asked different questions. Who’s in it? That actor—what other movies was she in? What other TV shows? Who’s directing? How did it fare with the critics?

And I could not understand why on earth they’d be interested in that sort of thing when there’s a whole technicolour explosion of sensory overload happening on the screen right in front of them! I remember a thought that occurred to me when I was ten and we had just finished watching Horton Hears a Who! in theatres. My parents were noting to each other, “Oh hey, it’s this actor and that actor!” And I privately thought, Why do they care about Jim Carrey and Steve Carell? The movie wasn’t about them, it was about Horton the Elephant and Whoville! But it was as if to them, the most compelling part of a movie happened in the credits.

But all the grown-ups were like this, so I sort of understood that this was just one of those things that would make sense when I got older.

I am now twenty-five and far beyond the age where I can be mistaken for a child. And I kind of understand how grown-ups think about movies now. But only kind of.

The actor thing I can understand now. In college I spent a lot of my time around hundreds of aspiring actors, and I understand how singularly powerful an actor’s performance can be. I also understand the thrill of recognition, the Oh hey, it’s Beanie Feldstein again! that comes from seeing someone from another movie show up in this movie. And I understand that that’s the kind of skill you can pick up by having seen hundreds of movies through the years, and that’s how adults can do that.

But there are other adult ways of thinking about movies that elude me, intellectual organs that I haven’t grown. One of them I’ll call Thinking Critically About Movies.

When you grow this organ, you gain the ability to form opinions like The pacing of the film is uneven or There are too many writers on the script and it shows or The character development was too subservient to the demands of the plot. With your extra sense, suddenly a film opens itself up to you, translucent, suspended, and you can see all its inner workings and realise things like This was just a retread of Episode 4 and These two characters could have been merged into one and This subplot could have been scrapped, saving seven minutes of runtime, less is more. You stop asking yourself, “Will the kids slay the monster?” and start asking yourself, “Will the writers stick the landing?”

I wish I could Think Critically About Movies. I have friends who can, some of whom haven’t spent a decade slaving away in the media industry writing treatments for screenplays. How do they do this? How can my friends’ minds generate these opinions when the only opinions I can coax out of my own mind are on the level of I liked the story? I don’t know.

Other classes of opinion I am unable to generate: casting (Jessica Mallory was brilliant in The Lamb Broker but she’s out of her element here, this role would have a better fit for Cate Hess), effects (the CGI was terrible, you could tell they were using a green screen because the shadow directions were all wrong), cinematography (okay, I don’t even know what cinematography actually is, let alone the kinds of articulate opinions one could have about it).

How can I learn how to think this sort of thing?