There is a rumour circulating that to appreciate Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, a second viewing should be mandatory. The director Edgar Wright summed it up in a tweet (“I call it ‘Inherent Twice’ because I am looking forward to seeing it again”), while Vanity Fair asked: “Are some movies allowed to require a second viewing?”.

Now the consensus is building that once is not enough. It’s a logical response. In common with The Big Sleep or Chinatown, the plot is as tangled and slippery as a bathtub of snakes. It goes without saying that additional viewings will increase comprehension levels. What this fails to take into account is that confusion is the desired effect from a first encounter with Inherent Vice. There is something to be said for preserving that state. We don’t usually go back to see how a horror movie plays without the heebie-jeebies. A whodunnit is never the same once we know whodunnit. In its own way, Inherent Vice will be a different film the second time around. Most are.

The idea that we can’t understand it in one sitting is problematic for audiences and critics in different ways. A cinemagoer who has an allergic reaction to Anderson’s movie can’t be blamed for scoffing at the prospect of spending another £12, and a further two-and-half-hours of her life, watching something that left her bored or bewildered the first time. It could be, as Eddie Murphy once said in a different context, that anything you have to acquire a taste for was never meant to be eaten.

Critics face a problem of logistics, as well as cultural democracy. Film critics on national newspapers have to cram in anything up to 12 screenings a week. If Anderson’s picture should be given the benefit of the doubt, the courtesy should be extended to other films too. There are 10 titles released in cinemas in the same week as Inherent Vice. Will the Disney animation Big Hero 6 or the Manic Street Preachers documentary No Manifesto also be the recipients of double vision?

I say this as a critic who cannot claim to have had only one Vice. I first saw the film at a public preview, knowing that, whether or not I liked it, I would need to return with my notepad before writing a review. It was the same with three other titles I saw recreationally at the London film festival, then watched again recently with my critic’s hat on. Each time, my initial reaction was compounded. The spell of Inherent Vice held fast; the horror movie It Follows still looked visionary; Whiplash was just as thrilling; Foxcatcher hadn’t improved one jot. Had I experienced a different reaction, I would have needed to point that out in print, just as some critics differentiate between their own first-look reviews, penned in the white heat of a Cannes premiere, and the way the film plays many months later in the cold light of a Soho morning.

Lurking behind the Inherent Twice argument is the horror of getting it wrong. Changing one’s mind is part of being human and should be discouraged only in exceptional circumstances, such as when standing at the altar after saying “I do”. But anyone who concedes a misjudgement in print may worry about being seen as fatally weakened – a lame-duck critic. The fear is that all past and future judgements are rendered provisional the moment a critic says: oops.

Perhaps the most famous film critic, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, resisted repeat viewings. The one recorded instance of her seeing a film twice is the night she cancelled a dinner engagement to check that McCabe and Mrs Miller was as great as she had claimed. “She is seeing it again so she can say, as unequivocally as possible that, yes, she is absolutely sure it is damn close to being a masterpiece,” wrote the journalist George Malko, her companion that evening.

AO Scott, film critic of the New York Times, has his own reasons for refusing seconds. “Since I rarely have the opportunity to see a movie more than once before reviewing it, I try, in effect, to watch it twice in one sitting,” he said in 2004. “I need to experience the movie in the way everyone else will, but also, simultaneously, to reflect on that experience, to analyse my responses while at the same time allowing myself to have them. This is more complex than it sounds; it is more of an acquired technical skill than anything else, like learning to play left- and right-hand piano parts simultaneously.”

Seeing a movie twice in a professional capacity means entertaining the possibility that you were mistaken the first time; it introduces room for doubt. Equivocation already existed in the mind of Joe Morgenstern of Newsweek after he had filed his review of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. He called it “a squalid shoot-‘em-up for the moron trade”, but began to worry that he had been rash. Watching the film again on the day it opened, he said: “I just got this cold sweat on the back of my neck and thought, ‘Oh shit, I’ve missed the boat.’” Morgenstern had dinner with Kael, a champion of Bonnie and Clyde, who told him: “You really blew it.” At that point, he had already decided to recant in print, telling his readers: “I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.”

Dilys Powell, film critic of the Sunday Times, also publicly revised a controversial opinion. In 1960, she described Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom as “vulgar squalor” and “essentially vicious”. In 1994, she reversed her position. “Today, I find I am convinced that it is a masterpiece,” she wrote. “If, in some afterlife, conversation is permitted, I shall think it is my duty to seek out Michael Powell and apologise.”

No critic wants to be the equivalent either of Dick Rowe, the A&R man who rejected the Beatles, or the sycophantic crowd that mistook the emperor’s new clothes for Savile Row threads. It doesn’t help that the opinions of film critics are uniquely vulnerable to scorn and scrutiny, for two reasons. Cinema is the most democratic of the arts: most people across all generations have an opinion on movies, whereas only certain sections of society will have dust-ups over a Miley Cyrus album or a Braque exhibition.

What’s more, the objects of our criticism are readily available for inspection, unlike theatre or ballet. The majority of readers will have to take on trust the clumsiness of the staging in, say, a new Pirandello, whereas when I tell you that Matthew Vaughn’s latest film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is vile on every level, you can check for yourself and hold me immediately to account.

In 2006, this newspaper canvassed critics about their own bad calls. Anthony Quinn, then of the Independent, regretted going overboard on Life is Beautiful (“For the record, it stinks – and I wish I’d said so”) while Peter Bradshaw of this parish admitted he was unduly kind to The Fantastic Four (“I now concede it’s rubbish”). To step into the confessional myself, I should say that Rob Roy, Primal Fear and The Fifth Element are all examples of love at second sight after unfairly dismissing them in print. They can’t be the only films that would be improved given another chance. Was my judgement broken when I panned Broken Embraces? Maybe the fault was with me on The Fault in Our Stars.

Most critics will concur with AO Scott that it is usually only the nuances that are mutable: “I don’t think I’ve ever, at least since I started reviewing, reversed myself completely on a movie. Sometimes, though, I’ve seen movies again and felt that the emphasis of my review wasn’t quite right – either that I was too hard on minor failings or too forgiving of more significant ones.” The dishonest part would be to stick completely to a second impression without owning up to a radically different first one.

And there has to be some tantalising quality that lures critic or consumer back in the first place. The critic Nicholas Barber put it rather nicely when reviewing Björk’s album Post 20 years ago. “It takes a dozen listens to get used to this album,” he wrote, “but only one to realise that you want to listen to it a dozen times.”