The rules this site answers to. Short list, no exceptions clause.
Every review is a film I’ve watched
The whole thing rests on this, so it goes first. Every review here comes from sitting with the actual film, start to finish — usually more than once. If I haven’t seen it, or can’t remember it well enough to argue about it honestly, it doesn’t get covered, no matter how badly the release calendar wants a take. The argument is the product, and you cannot argue about a movie you didn’t watch.
Scores
Five-point scale, and the number is mine. I read widely before and after writing — the critical conversation is part of the research, and pretending otherwise would be a pose. But research is not a verdict. If my score lands a mile from consensus, the review will tell you why, and the score stays.
Spoilers
The line is a standard trailer: if the film’s own marketing would not show it, the review will not name it. Endings stay sealed. Late reveals stay sealed. The final image stays sealed even when it is the best thing I can say about the movie. When a film deserves a reading that cannot be done clean, it gets a separate Full Spoilers piece with its own warning on the door — and the spoiler-free review never so much as nods at what is behind that door.
Independence
Coverage is not for sale here. No payment, no junket favors, no publicist input into what gets covered or what the verdict is. You will also never see an aggregator percentage or a box-office number doing the work a critic should be doing — if I cannot make the case myself, the case does not run.
Tools and automation
I use whatever makes the work better or faster — from the voice dictation I write with to the automation this whole site runs on. That has always been how I operate. The Oscar Ledger is built and maintained as a structured dataset; the publishing pipeline is wired to move quickly; I lean on modern tools across production, and I see no reason to be coy about it. What none of it touches is the criticism itself. I watch the film. I make the argument. I assign the score. No tool has ever decided what I think of a movie, and none ever will — the judgment is the one thing that does not get outsourced.
The Ledger
The Lunara Oscar Ledger was compiled the long way — by watching the ceremonies — and is maintained as a structured dataset, with underlying ceremony records sourced from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A century of records means errors surface; when one does, it gets fixed in the dataset itself, so every page built from it corrects at once.
Corrections
Get a fact wrong, fix the piece, say so. That is the whole policy. Taste is not a correctable error — if a review made you mad, that may simply mean it worked.