When you write a movie review,

I don't know if I have much to offer beyond what's already been covered, but I'll also add that I don't review every film I watch. While I need to get better at this, I only write reviews of films when I feel motivated to do so. If I like a film but don't feel an itch to write anything about it, I find it better to simply assign it a rating and move on since I'd feel far less passion from writing something about it. If I feel compelled to expand upon an aspect which either really stood out to me or I found interesting for whatever reason though, I tend to enjoy myself more. It sometimes helps to sit on my thoughts for a day or two as well. Also, while this is ironic given my participation in the Hall of Infamy, I enjoy reviewing films I liked (or were mixed on) more than those I disliked.

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Any review that avoids a significant part of the movie misses the point. The only thing I avoid is spoilers. What's a spoiler? I don't know exactly, but I generally know them when I see them. Movies are a synthesis of writing, staging, FX, sound, speech, acting, music, etc.

I remove reason and accountability then go from there.

I think the "depending on the film" part is salient. Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will isn't exactly a paragon of meaningful themes or subject matter but it's still a technical marvel that can be studied at length. IIRC even George Lucas stole something from it for Star Wars.

I'm not saying you cannot talk about the subject matter or the story at all. My advice was to focus on the how, not to completely erase the what.

But ultimately the greatness of Mizoguchi isn't just that he tackles social themes. His films that talk about women sacrificing for often ungrateful men fit right into the typical giri-ninjo theme that was popular in literature and theatre at the time.

Thinking that tackling "important" topics is enough to make a great film is a common misconception prevalent among many contemporary directors. "This film starts a discussion so it's valuable" is a bad idea. Anything can start a discussion, you don't need a film for that. With modern films of this kind, you can talk about them without even watching them. You know the important theme, so you don't need the film. But a film must be something more than that. It must defend itself in ways pure cinematic; in the "how".

Reviewers should praise films for the how. Instead of describing the story, they should talk about how it was portrayed by the director. How that scene that impressed them played out, what cinematic techniques were used to achieve it, what the director's auteurship and philosophy on cinema are and how these two are evident in this film, and so on. If you sit down to write about a film and you don't have much to say about it except for the barebones story, or the themes it tackles, and whether the film is problematic or not in the current sociopolitical climate, I think there are two possibilities:
1. The film isn't anything special in the, let's call it, "art department", so talking about its story and themes is all you can do. Let's hope it's at least entertaining/a nice watch.
2. You don't know/care about the "art department". If you don't know, you can learn. If you don't care, so be it. But I think that writing about cinema while ignoring the most important part of it is weird. Not that I'm not guilty of that myself; we all are. But that doesn't make it the right thing to do.

If you think about it, even the screenplay is the how, or rather a combination of the what and the how. But the how already starts there. Rear Window's screenplay talks about camera movements a lot. But this wasn't true for most screenplays. Many directors back in the day received finalized screenplays and then began to rewrite them to make them more cinematic. Boris Barnet was known for completely rewriting screenplays to make them his own. Allan Dwan said: "A screenplay is just a blueprint. The director’s job is to make it cinematic, to figure out how to go from one shot to another, to make it flow visually." This is the how.

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the how isn’t important, or downplaying it really. If anything, I think most would agree that the subject matter itself doesn’t mean much. At the same time, how it is filmed (angles, blocking, camera movements etc) is sometimes over hyped as if its all that matters. Again, it depends on the film.*

The Color of Pomegranates is probably a great example of a film that is shot so well, and it’s subject matter was almost impenetrable. I had to read what it was about to understand it, to be honest. Once I did it made sense!
Jean Rollin also comes to mind, because his films are so interesting to watch, not just because of the story, but because of his technique.

So for me, I can’t agree completely that the story shouldn’t be talked about. If a critic (or a reviewer in our case) is any good at what he does, he’ll mention both. A film doesn’t need to be artistic to be great though! Although it certainly helps, sure. But if a films merit merely hangs on how it looks and by how it’s made, isn’t that, too, a fine thread to hang on by? It doesn’t mean much of it’s empty and shallow,, regardless of how artistic it looks.
Stories and subject matter are often a huge part of the film, after all.

Reviewers are downplaying it by not writing about it enough. Mainstream filmmakers are downplaying it by making bland, unartistic, formally uninteresting films.

It's almost all. If you don't make the story "live" using these techniques, your film is inferior to the film made by a guy who uses these techniques. And using these techniques in an ordered and conscious way makes you an artist versus a craftsman. That's the basics of auteur theory.

That desire to understand a film's "story" no matter what is another "problem." Impenetrable is good, it challenges you and makes you work for it. Not understanding is good, it brings out pleasure and makes you focus on other aspects of the film.

His films are artistic pulp of the highest order - yet another "genre" where the what is secondary to the how.

I never said it shouldn't be talked about. I said it shouldn't be talked as the only thing. The how and the what are often so tied that it should be hard to talk about one and not the other, but many reviewers still find ways to do that. I find this surprising.

To be merely good, maybe not. But to be great or better than great, yes, it needs to be artistic, meaning it needs to have more value than just a good story with poor/bland/normie/unauteurlike execution.

I think it tells a lot! And I think, again, that the how and the what are intermingled. By improving the how, you indirectly improve the what. Questions arise: Why did he shoot it like that? What was his intention? What does this amazing shot mean? And the answers are the what. But notice how the what is now mantled in a wonderful how! A talented auteur can make a normie romantic comedy, almost an unbearable one, but inject auteurship and hidden themes and transgressions that elevate the whole thing to the rank of a masterwork, making it effectively anti-romantic. By molding and shaping the framing, blocking, camera movements, the space between characters, and so on, the director transforms a film that should be worthless into something that has worth, precisely by using the appropriate how.

Even Spielberg, whom you seem to love more than I do, engages in all sorts of visual tricks to improve the how. Think how Spielberg uses a dissolve to make the Paramount logo transform into an in-movie mountain in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's the how. And it seems to be one of those "purer" hows that don't necessarily interconnect with the what. Does it have any meaning? Perhaps? You can draw meaning from it. But it's more meta than a way of improving the story itself. But does that make the film a tiny bit better? No doubt about that.

Yes, absolutely. While the memory is more fresh when you review the film straight afterwards I think some subconscious impressions can surface at a later time.
Actually it happened to me today, and I thought "how come I didn't notice that when I watched the film last week?".
But of course I had noticed it, it's just that the conscious part of my brains gave priority to the more obvious impressions.

I find if I wait a couple of days to write my review, all of the passion or disdain that I had for the movie evaporates. Leaving me with just analytical thoughts on the film. I'm not a scientist so I don't want to write analytically. If I review a movie that I feel strongly about I want to do it from a gut reflex level and with emotional conviction.

I have to write a review immediately after watching the movie. If I wait even 24 hrs, I forget half the movie and half of what I wanted to say about it. I’m old.

Me too, buddy

I really struggle with avoiding spoilers

Imagine watching a movie at night and say you watch it at 8PM and it ends at like at 10PM and you're very tired to even write a reviews and the next day you're damn I forgot to write about the movie.

I tend to avoid watching movies at these times since I usually get tired and end up falling asleep during the movie. Also, when I have work the next morning, I just go to bed early and watch the movie like sometime in the afternoon when I get home from work or early morning when I don't have work.

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I try not to do that either but it does happen on occasion and when it does I will put the movie back on and watch the first 15-20 minutes which is enough to remind me about the rest of the movie and what I wanted to say about it.