This Is Us has become of the biggest hits on US TV over its two seasons to date, but it doesn't look like its creator's new movie will be quite as successful.
Dan Fogelman's Life Itself, starring Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke and Olivia Wilde, has been savaged by critics in the reviews and currently boasts a 12% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but Fogelman thinks it's all the fault of "white male critics".
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"I think a couple of the early reviews that have come out about this movie feel so out of left field to everybody who's a part of this movie and to people who have been screening this film for the better part of a year now to both fancy filmmakers, critics, and audiences," he told TooFab.
"There's a disconnect between something that is happening between our primarily white male critics who don't like anything that has any emotion."
The problem for Fogelman is that even female critics aren't exactly keen on his review, such as LA Weekly's April Wolfe calling it a "drippy, half-baked melodrama" and Slate's Inkoo Kang saying it's mired in "fatal blandness".
Ouch. But Fogelman thinks it's a sign of something that a "little bit broken" in both movie and TV criticism.
"I think that the people with the widest reach are getting increasingly cynical and vitriolic and I think there are a couple of genres and a couple of ideas that they [attack, which] doesn't speak to not just a mainstream audience, but also a sophisticated audience," he added.
"I don't feel that often now our pop and film critics are speaking for a sophisticated audience anymore."
Life Itself is out now in the US and will be released in UK cinemas and on Sky Cinema on January 4, 2019.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
