Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs. I watched a lot of movies this year, and I bet you did too.

Some of them were good, some were bad, a few were terrible, but I enjoyed every single one of them.

Does that make me a film junkie?

One thing is, I'm not alone. Last year, Americans spent more than $11 billion at the box office and billions more on streaming services.

We love the movies so much, we even watch the awards ceremonies, which when you think about it is just kind of weird.

We're a nation of film junkies.

And today, onto the best of our knowledge, we're going to take that love a little deeper.

Movies puts one into something that I think is closer to the dream state. And I think when you're in that kind of state, you're able to experience parts of yourself that maybe you don't normally think about.

So you can sit in the dark and let a movie wash over you.

Enjoy the escape from reality.

But when the lights go up, it's time to think about what you saw.

Figure out what you liked, what you didn't, and why.

Film critic A.O. Scott does that for a living, and he thinks it matters. For all of us, that critics play an important role in any culture.

He sat down recently to talk with Steve Paulson about his new book, Better Living Through Criticism.

I think we're in a very interesting time for criticism. One of

the reasons that I wrote this book and was interested in writing it is there was a lot of

stuff being written in 2011, 2012 as I was starting to write this book about how social media,

marketing algorithms, user-generated content reviews on places like Amazon and Yelp,

and all of that was going to make professional critics obsolete.

What I came to believe was that this was not really about the overthrowing of cultural authority of professional critics, but rather the kind of the coming true or the coming into reality of something that had always really been there,

but not as visible,

which is criticism as an ongoing public conversation.

...