What the Movies I Watched This Year Taught Me About Storytelling

You can learn just as much from watching a good movie as a bad one.

I watch movies all the time, and it’s gotta be one of my top five favorite things to do ever. An ideal movie-watching experience takes me outside of my humdrum life, transporting me into a different and more interesting universe for 90+ minutes. Every film I watch, good or bad or somewhere in between, teaches me something novel about storytelling, how best to entertain an audience, and what pitfalls to avoid. Even though I’m a nonfiction writer, I try to translate these lessons in my own work.

I like keeping a meticulous record of the movies I see almost as much as I like watching them. Since 2018, my boyfriend and I have assigned a letter grade to every movie we watch together, keeping track of all the data on several giant post-it notes that hang in his office/the guest room/our home movie theater. Many people would say our grading system is harsh — for a movie to get an A, I have to both love it and find it technically flawless. As yet, the only movie I’ve given an A to is WALL•E, though almost all of my other favorite movies like Total Recall (1990), The Big Lebowski, Alien, Brother (2000), and The King of Comedy received A-’s.

Under my rubric, a B is a very good grade, a C denotes a movie that is competent but deeply average and oftentimes stupid, and a D means it’s a total disaster. (No movie we’ve graded has gotten an F because we…