The danger of the constant antagonistic resistance to criticism is that it fosters a shallow culture of engagement. Films become reduced to fandoms and sentimental preferences: which actor one likes, which director one defends, and who made the most money at the box office.
By Joseph Jonathan
When Kemi Adetiba’s much-anticipated crime thriller, To Kill A Monkey, debuted on Netflix on July 18, 2025, it quickly captured widespread attention. Nigerian audiences responded with enthusiasm across social media, showering praises on the series. In contrast, reviews from leading African film publications offered a more restrained assessment, highlighting concerns around storytelling, structural plotting flaws, and a lack of directorial precision.
This disparity is not unusual in Nollywood discourse. What stood out, however, was the intensity of the backlash against critics. On platforms like X, critics were accused of being elitist, overly intellectual, and disconnected from the tastes of everyday viewers. Some posts implied that watching too many films had dulled their capacity for enjoyment, while others pointed to the public’s embrace of the series as proof that Nigerian critics lacked cultural alignment or relevance.
One of the most common, and telling, responses to critical reviews in Nigerian film discourse is the refrain: “If you think it’s so bad, go and make your own movie”. It’s a statement that surfaces again and again, especially on social media, when critics express dissatisfaction with a film’s story, execution, or artistic choices. On the surface, it may appear as a defense of the filmmaker’s effort. But at its core, the statement reflects a deep-rooted misunderstanding of what criticism is, and what it aims to do.
Criticism is not competition; it is not an alternative attempt at filmmaking. It is an intellectual and artistic engagement with a work that already exists. The critic’s task is not to recreate or replicate the filmmaker’s process but to examine it. To ask what the film is trying to say, how well it says it, what choices it makes, and what implications those choices carry. A critic functions like a mirror: not creating the image, but reflecting, interpreting, and sometimes magnifying what is already there.
Moreover, the demand that critics become filmmakers reveals a troubling binary: that only those who make art can speak about it meaningfully. But this ignores the long tradition of criticism as its own intellectual discipline, one that requires a different skill set, but is no less valuable. As American film critic, Charles Taylor, said, “Criticism is meant to help people make sense of work they don’t know or assume they won’t like, or work that they know but haven’t really thought about.”
The divide between critics and general audiences in Nigeria is neither new nor unique, but it has become more pronounced in recent years as Nollywood’s visibility and output have grown. At the heart of the tension lies a fundamental disagreement over what it means to “enjoy” or “evaluate” a film. Audiences often seek emotional resonance, relatability, or sheer entertainment value. Critics, in contrast, are trained—either formally or through repeated practice—to assess narrative structure, cinematography, performances, directorial choices, thematic coherence and cultural relevance.
This divergence in orientation breeds suspicion. Viewers perceive critics as being out of touch, overly picky, or quick to dismiss films that don’t meet foreign standards. Critics, on the other hand, often feel their work is underappreciated—their attempts at thoughtful engagement with Nigerian cinema mistaken for contempt. The fatigue from watching a high volume of underwhelming productions can indeed make some critics more attuned to flaws. But this is not necessarily cynicism; it is a function of pattern recognition and a desire for the industry to strive for better.
For instance, storytelling remains one of Nollywood’s most pressing issues, a point even audiences tend to agree with. But what does it say about the industry when the reviews themselves begin to feel interchangeable?
When critics can write about weak plotting, shallow character arcs, or clumsy pacing, and those observations could apply to any number of films released within a given year? This repetitiveness not only reflects a creative stagnation within the industry, it also breeds fatigue for critics who are expected to engage each film afresh, even when they are watching the same problems play out repeatedly.
The risk is that reviews become a kind of déjà vu, not because critics lack originality, but because the films offer so little variation in their flaws. This dynamic further widens the gap between critics and audiences.
For viewers who approach each film in isolation, such repeated criticisms may seem exaggerated, elitist, or needlessly harsh. But for critics who watch and review multiple titles weekly, the repetition is a pattern, one that signals deeper structural issues in Nollywood’s development pipeline.
Yet, instead of prompting industry introspection, these patterns often result in hostility toward the critic, whose consistency is mistaken for negativity, and whose insistence on higher standards is misconstrued as contempt for local storytelling.
These reactions are not entirely surprising. Film is a deeply personal medium, and for many Nigerian filmmakers working under immense budget, time, and distribution pressures, a critical review can feel like a dismissal of hard-earned effort. But this tendency to view critique as hostility creates a dangerous precedent, one where filmmakers expect only praise or silence.
Take, for example, the case of Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman (2022), adapted from Wole Soyinka’s play and directed by the acclaimed Biyi Bandele. While the film was visually impressive, critics pointed out its sluggish pacing and reliance on the source material’s language without enough adaptation for screen. Rather than sparking healthy debate about the challenges of adapting theatre to film, some reactions from the filmmaking community framed the criticism as evidence that Nigerians “don’t appreciate their own”.
It is necessary to note that the discomfort many Nigerian filmmakers and audiences exhibit toward critique does not occur in isolation. It reflects a broader societal aversion to criticism across various spheres, from politics to religion, academia to art. In a society where respect is often conflated with silence, speaking truth to power, or offering a contrary opinion, is frequently interpreted as insolence or antagonism.
This resistance is ingrained early. In schools, questioning a teacher can be seen as insubordination. In churches, disagreeing with a pastor’s interpretation may be read as a lack of faith. In families, offering a different perspective from an elder can be dismissed as disrespect.
Across these domains, critique is rarely engaged on its merits; rather, the speaker’s age, perceived loyalty, or tone becomes the focus. It is therefore no surprise that cultural critique is viewed through the same hostile lens. The result is a national culture that encourages silence, panders to praise, and resists reflection.
In Nollywood, this manifests in several ways: from directors blocking critics who publish unfavourable reviews, to online audiences launching personal attacks on reviewers/critics.
Social media reactions often mirror this defensive stance. When a critic questions a film’s storytelling or technical choices, the response from a segment of the audience is swift and hostile: “Why can’t you just enjoy the movie?”, “Let people like what they like”, “You think you know more than everyone else?”. These deflections are not unique to film, but they are amplified in a country where cinema is still emerging as a mainstream cultural force, and where many see Nollywood as deserving of uncritical support.
But a film industry, like any institution, grows through scrutiny. Critique is not the enemy of progress; it is a catalyst for it. In Hollywood, for instance, the rise of serious film criticism in the mid-20th century coincided with major artistic leaps in filmmaking.
Directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were deeply influenced by the critics of the time, many of whom later became filmmakers themselves. In Nigeria, that symbiosis has yet to fully form, in part because criticism is still too often perceived as condemnation.
Caught in the crossfire are the filmmakers, who often default to the easiest defense: if the fans love it, the critics must be wrong. And because Nigerian audiences are fiercely loyal—and often anti-intellectual when it comes to art—many filmmakers weaponise that loyalty to shield themselves from uncomfortable feedback.
This dynamic discourages honest dialogue and turns every review into a battle between “us” and “them”. But what’s lost in this posturing is the very thing that could help filmmakers grow. When criticism is treated as an attack, filmmakers stop evolving. They repeat formulas. They make only what they know will trend. And eventually, the applause dries up, because even the audience moves on.
Veteran filmmaker. Mildred Okwo, said it best: “If they (critics) don’t write essays about your work, you are finished o”. It was less a threat than a statement of fact because without critics, there is no intellectual scaffolding to hold the industry accountable or to elevate its best efforts. It is the essays and videos that give the work longevity. They place a film in context. They help it mean more than just “that thing people watched in July”.
Film critics are not adversaries. They are interlocutors, a necessary part of the ecosystem that helps cinema grow beyond its immediate entertainment value. The best critics do not merely judge; they contextualise. They trace influences, highlight subtext, draw attention to a filmmaker’s evolving style or stagnant tendencies. They ask the difficult but necessary questions that art demands.
What most people often fail to see is that criticism is an investment. A critic willing to engage with a film, even harshly, is paying attention. Silence is more damning. When a film receives no critical attention, it becomes harder to track its impact, learn from its missteps, or place it within the larger history of Nigerian cinema.
When critics, audiences, and filmmakers engage meaningfully, beyond ego and emotion, the result can be mutual growth. The filmmaker sees their work through new eyes; the critic gains a deeper understanding of the filmmaker’s intentions. That is how mature industries function: through tension, yes, but also through respect.
The danger of the constant antagonistic resistance to criticism is that it fosters a shallow culture of engagement. Films become reduced to fandoms and sentimental preferences: which actor one likes, which director one defends, who made the most money at the box office. Without a critical framework to interpret what films are doing—or failing to do—the industry risks becoming insular, focused more on applause than introspection.
In the absence of robust film criticism, what fills the void is not silence, it is noise. Celebrity gossip, stan wars, viral memes, and romanticised character shipping quickly take centre stage. The conversation around cinema becomes dominated by spectacle and sentiment, not substance. While pop culture discourse is not inherently bad—indeed, it often drives public interest in films—it cannot substitute for critical engagement that interrogates craft, meaning, and intention.
The cost of sidelining critics is more profound than a few bad takes going unchallenged. Without critics, there is no long-term documentation of artistic progress or regression. No one asking: What are the thematic preoccupations of our filmmakers? How are genres evolving in Nollywood? Are we innovating visually and narratively, or simply reproducing formulas that guarantee box office returns?
In this sense, the absence of criticism does not mean a film is safe from scrutiny, only that the scrutiny becomes uninformed, unstructured, and driven by algorithms, not insight. It also means that the few filmmakers taking creative risks are often ignored, while those who play to popular expectations are celebrated, a cycle that discourages experimentation and rewards monotony.
The recent flare-up between audiences and the critical press may feel like just another episode in the never-ending friction between art and analysis. But it is emblematic of something deeper: a cultural tension that extends beyond cinema and speaks to how Nigeria handles dissent, introspection, and the difficult work of self-improvement.
It’s a reminder that if criticism continues to be viewed as an attack rather than a mirror, not only will the films suffer, but so will the conversations that shape the future of Nigerian art.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.