Quick take: A good film gives you an excellent experience. An important film changes something — about how you think, about what cinema can do, about the culture that produced it. These overlap sometimes, but not always, and knowing the difference matters for understanding why certain films stay in the conversation for decades while others, just as enjoyable, quietly disappear.
Somewhere around the third year of watching films seriously, most people start noticing a discrepancy. There are films they loved — would happily watch again, recommend to friends without hesitation, think back on with warmth — and there are films that matter in a different and harder-to-articulate way. Films they might not call pleasurable exactly, but that lodged somewhere deeper and haven’t dislodged. The vocabulary for this distinction can be slippery, but the distinction itself is real, and it’s worth having the language to talk about it clearly.
What Makes a Film Good
A good film executes its intentions with skill and delivers the experience it promises. A good thriller generates sustained tension. A good comedy produces genuine laughter. A good romance makes you feel the connection between its characters. A good action film stages its set pieces with spatial clarity and physical consequence. These are craft achievements, and they’re not trivial — plenty of films fail to achieve them. When a film succeeds at what it sets out to do and produces a satisfying emotional experience in the process, it’s a good film by any reasonable standard.
Good films also tend to be rewatchable. Because their quality is primarily in the experience — in the way scenes are constructed and tension is built and character is revealed — the experience holds up on repeat viewings. You might notice things you missed the first time, but the core satisfaction remains. A well-made thriller is still tense on a second watch even when you know the outcome, because the tension was built into the architecture, not just generated by surprise.
Insight: The vast majority of films worth watching are good in the sense defined above, and that’s no small thing. The word “important” is often deployed to dismiss mere goodness, as if pleasurable competence were somehow insufficient. It isn’t. Good films are worth celebrating on their own terms.
What Makes a Film Important
Importance is a different category. An important film does something that shifts the terms of the conversation — either about cinema itself, or about the culture cinema is embedded in, or about the human experience cinema can reflect. This can happen in several ways. A technically revolutionary film (2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity) demonstrates what the medium is capable of and forces filmmakers to reckon with new possibilities. A culturally significant film (Do the Right Thing, Moonlight, Get Out) enters a cultural conversation at a moment when that conversation needs a new voice, and it changes what can be said and how.
Importance can also be historical. Many films we now consider important were not necessarily great viewing experiences — some early cinema is fascinating but formally crude by contemporary standards. But those films matter because they established conventions, invented techniques, or opened doors that everything after them walked through. Watching Birth of a Nation today means watching a technically innovative, morally abhorrent film that shaped the grammar of cinema for decades. Its importance doesn’t require anyone to like it.
“A good film leaves you satisfied. An important film leaves you different — even if you can’t immediately say how, or whether you wanted to be.”
When the Categories Overlap
The most celebrated films in cinema history tend to be ones where goodness and importance coincide — films that are both superbly crafted experiences and that changed something about cinema or culture. Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made not just because it’s pleasurable to watch (it is, though it takes some adjustment) but because it introduced formal innovations that influenced virtually every filmmaker who came after it. Casablanca is a very good film that also happened to capture a specific historical moment with such precision that it became a cultural landmark. These films earn their canonical status because they operate in both registers at once.
The problem with film canons is that they tend to privilege importance over goodness, which can make them feel excluding and joyless if you come to them expecting pleasurable viewing experiences. Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, Persona — these are genuinely rewarding films, but their rewards require patience and a willingness to meet them on their own terms. They’re not withholding pleasure to be difficult; they’re operating at a level of formal ambition where the pleasures are different from those of conventional narrative cinema.
Films That Are Good But Not Important
- Expert genre films with no formal ambition beyond the genre
- Crowd-pleasers that perfectly deliver emotional satisfaction
- Beautifully made films with nothing new to say
- Technically accomplished entertainments without cultural resonance
- The vast majority of films anyone has ever enjoyed
Films That Are Important But Not Good
- Technically pioneering but aesthetically crude early films
- Culturally significant films that haven’t aged well
- Formally innovative films that sacrificed accessibility
- Historically necessary context for later developments
- Films important to specific communities in ways that don’t universalize
Why the Distinction Matters
Understanding this distinction matters practically for how you approach both watching and talking about films. If you treat goodness and importance as the same thing, you end up either dismissing enjoyable films because they’re not important or overstating the pleasures of important films because you feel you’re supposed to enjoy them. Neither is honest.
A more useful approach is to hold both categories separately and apply them deliberately. This film is very good — it does exactly what it sets out to do with skill and produces the promised experience. That film is important — it changed what could be done, or said something necessary about a specific time and place, or demonstrated a formal possibility that hadn’t existed before. Sometimes the same film earns both assessments. Often it earns only one. Both assessments are worth making, and neither should crowd out the other.
Warning: “Important” is also one of the most abused words in film discourse — applied liberally to films that are merely prestigious, merely old, or merely liked by the right people. Importance should mean something has actually shifted, not that critics have awarded it the status of importance without examining their reasons.
The Short Version
- A good film executes its intentions skillfully and delivers a satisfying experience
- An important film shifts the terms of the conversation — about cinema, culture, or human experience
- The best canonical films earn both designations simultaneously
- Treating importance and goodness as identical leads to either dismissing enjoyable films or overpraising prestigious ones
- Important films aren’t always pleasant viewing; good films don’t need to change anything to be worth celebrating
- “Important” is frequently misapplied — it should mean something actually shifted, not just that critics approved
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I feel obligated to watch important films even if I don’t enjoy them?
No obligation, but the rewards of some important films are real — they’re just different from the rewards of conventionally enjoyable cinema. If you approach Persona or 2001 expecting a conventional narrative experience you’ll be confused; if you approach them as formal experiments in what cinema can do, they open up significantly. That said, watching films out of duty rarely produces genuine engagement. If a film isn’t reaching you, a different one might — try another entry point into the same director or tradition.
How do critics decide which films are important?
Often they don’t decide so much as recognize, after the fact, which films have had lasting influence. The Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll shifts every decade as critics update their assessments of which films have endured and which initial enthusiasms faded. Importance is partly a historical judgment — time reveals which films actually changed the conversation and which were impressive in the moment but left no lasting mark.
Can a popular blockbuster be an important film?
Yes, and history has some clear examples. Jaws essentially invented the summer blockbuster model and changed how Hollywood thought about releasing films. Star Wars created the franchise infrastructure that still dominates film culture. These films are important in industrial and cultural terms regardless of whether critics place them in the art cinema canon. Importance doesn’t require prestige.
Is importance about content or form?
Both, and often the two are inseparable in the films that matter most. 2001 is important primarily for its formal innovations in visual effects and editing. Do the Right Thing is important primarily for its cultural and political content. Citizen Kane is important for both simultaneously — formal innovation in the service of something it had to say. The most fully important films usually find ways to make form and content reinforce each other.
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