It actually takes a certain level of confidence in your own tastes and preference for you to tell right away if a most spiritual film is good before watching it. Barring all other people’s views, it’s your view that counts the most, when it comes to making a decision on which movie to watch, given all the confusing choices you have on hand. Ignore other people’s recommendations, and follow your own taste – though you don’t need to be vocal about this. Handed with this overall strategy, you may have to be guided with some other tactics to ensure getting yourself to watch a good movie:
1) Constant regular time spent on viewing movies that catch your interest – sit down and spend the next 30 minutes watching a full-length movie, and decide within this time frame if the rest of the movie is worth your valuable time. If not, just walk out, and do something worthy your time, as you won’t regret it. Lessons learned from this kind of experience will be useful for your next venture into the movies.
2) Engage in constant conversation about movies with people whose views on movies you respect. Don’t even get into argument with these people – you need to listen, and make notes on these movies. Casually, ask about their top 10 movies of the past year, or all time – they’ll be most willing to share the list. And then try to watch all of them – then decide for yourself if you agree with their judgment. If so, your respect for their tastes will be validated, and you can then always rely on them to recommend you which movies to watch – though you don’t really have to credit them for this, as what matters here, really, is your own decision and taste.
3) Consistency in output of the director of the movie you’d like to watch – a good director will have a reputation following him / her for the remaining years of career finicky viewers have granted this director. It takes a long while to be able to do this, or else the director won’t last for long (as movies are very expensive to make), as we have heard that artists’ works are good as their last respective movie. For example, almost all movies of the late Alfred Hitchcock are considered by moviegoers to be gems by themselves – so there goes the consistency value – this is difficult to keep and sustain. So you may have to be always on the lookout for good directors who have consistently created and crafted a good list of output from their films – this “consistency” you use as a guide on which movie to watch if you happened to read the name of the director whose output you’ve been tracking (or planning to watch).
4) Check members’ reputation that make up the creative team of the movie you’re planning to watch – you’ll have greater chances of seeing a good movie if more members of the team have been recognized in their fields, who have to include the director, editor, screenplay writer, the production designer, and of course, the actors.
5) Heed to some extent the recommendation of the critics – you have to read their analysis and rating, and decide for yourself. Read the critics’ works in the papers that you read. It’s always best to read their write-ups, than just listening or watching them on TV, as you’ll have better ideas on why a certain critic is recommending a movie, whereas another one detests it.