Like any criticism, film criticism offers nearly infinite ways to look at its subject, far beyond simple value judgments or hot takes. I was recently reading James Baldwin’s 1976 book The Devil Finds Work , which is largely criticism of his own of films he’d seen throughout his life, and I’d be astonished by how much he packs into the book’s tidy 125 pages if it weren’t for the fact that this is James Baldwin, and so you expect to be astonished.