TALKING PICTURES

How to Watch Movies

By Ann Hornaday

289 pp. Basic Books. $26.

Consider the following four movie reviews:

“Awesome!”

“Awful!”

“Criminally underrated!”

“It is my sad duty to report that I was mildly disappointed!”

The first two reactions are probably the analyses of amateur movie lovers, and the latter are more likely the declarations of professional critics, but still: All four are equally valid reactions to a movie-going experience. And all four are equally useless opinions, of no interest — unless that opiner can back up sentiment with sense. Analysis. A cogent explanation of the factors that go into passing personal judgment on a work of cinema. Reasonable minds can differ and all that, but the first requirement of any meaningful movie debate is a demonstration of that reason — beyond “I love Wes Anderson movies!” and “I can’t stand Wes Anderson movies!”

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In “Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies,” Ann Hornaday provides a pleasantly calm, eminently sensible, down-the-middle primer for the movie lover — amateur, professional or Twitter-centric orator — who would like to acquire and sharpen basic viewing skills. An estimable movie critic at The Washington Post and a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in criticism, Hornaday explains upfront that she did not grow up, in her words, as “a congenital movie geek”; rather, in a winding journalism career that began at Ms. magazine, she learned her craft on the job. In this way, she says, she is more like her readers than like a film studies major or a gender studies major or a was-Pauline-Kael-really-all-that? major. And, inspired by a series of instructional articles she assembled for her readers some years back, here she considers various aspects of filmmaking in chapters that roughly follow the timeline of production: screenplay, acting, production design, cinematography, editing, sound and music, and directing. (Missing from consideration: a grasp of cinema history and cultural context within which to assess Movie A in relationship to Movies B-Z.)