Chris: according to

[fiefoe]

The thought occurred to me that perhaps you could judge a movie not by the reviewer's comments about it, but the subjective quality of the reviews themselves. Perhaps seeing a good movie raises the reviewer's abilities?

There are usually only two things you can usually hope for in movie reviews. The first is to find a reviewer who you generally agree with and use that as a guide as to whether you'll like a movie; Roger Ebert is very knowledgeable but I'm never going to agree much with someone who gave The Cell four stars.  Likewise, Magnolia is a critic's darling, but I found it to be pretentious crap.

The second is to find some scathing reviews that are funny.  Ebert's pal Richard Roeper has some great lines - "The differences between the French and the Americans in Le Divorce were so simplistic they could have been edited by George Bush.'', "This guy's not the Phantom of the Opera, hes the Fashionably Scarred Stud of the Opera and that just doesn't work.'' This may raise your spirits, but doesn't help your to-see list grow.

So, let's turn our attention to Wong Kar Wai's 2046 (the movie in question). The Onion's AV Club is about as "high end" as the mainstream comes when reviewing movies, but this still caught my eye:
   2046 is about what happens in the smoldering embers of extinguished love.

    which, while perhaps a little over the top, is fairly poetic for a movie review. Moving over to the New York Times' review, we don't even have to get to the article itself, the title alone is worth noting:
   Desire and Loss in the Curve of a Back

   Nicely bookended by
    [Memory] gives us a glimpse of the eternal and, like art at its most sublime, like this film, a means for transcendence.

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com (one of my favorite places for movie reviews) isn't as enthusiastic as some of his fellow critics, but still manages some good fragments - "intoxicatingly overripe,'' "a condition of permanent aesthetic and spiritual paralysis.'' 

{Chris rests his case here.}