The Essential Mike D'angelo Reading List: a Retrospective Timeline
By Sarah Jenkins
Long before Substack newsletters or digital video essays existed, the vanguard of online film criticism convened on rec.arts.movies.reviews. D'Angelo established his voice within that text-only ecosystem during the mid-1990s. While traditional print critics fought space limitations in local newspapers, D'Angelo used Usenet's unbounded real estate to establish an encyclopedic archive that eventually became The Man Who Viewed Too Much.
His early essays focused on formal construction rather than sentimental plot synopses. Writing about 1990s independent cinema landmarks by directors like Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, and Wong Kar-wai, D'Angelo demonstrated an acute sensitivity to rhythm and editing. A movie did not earn praise for having good intentions or progressive politics; it earned praise if its images justified their sequential existence. This utilitarian perspective distinguished his work from the poetic impressionism of Pauline Kael's disciples. Readers recognized a critic who treated movie evaluation as an empirical pursuit.
His obsessive tracking habits also took root during this period. D'Angelo assigned numeric ratings to every film he watched, maintaining a strict distribution curve where a score of 50 represented true, functional mediocrity rather than failure. That standard made his rare scores in the 80s and 90s feel like earned distinctions.
Sarah Jenkins is a veteran tech journalist with over 12 years of experience covering artificial intelligence, mobile innovations, and digital ethics. Her insights have appeared in leading technology publications worldwide.
