I'll pushback against Christopher Nolan's comments on bad film criticism. He's missing the forest for the trees.

I'm approaching this as a professional narrative consultant with a particular interest and specialization in theory of criticism. My job is to identify why people don't/would not like certain stories, beyond their surface-level criticism, so I can help writers fix the text before shipping or shooting.

Christopher Nolan's recent interview has him being lauded for saying something among the lines of "amateur film critics identify a narrative tool, and think that makes the tool invalid." He's mostly right, identifying a mechanism doesn't invalidate the mechanism. Just because you can identify a scene as "kick your puppies", does not mean that it is wrong to have your antagonist do something evidently bad so the audience does not feel bad for harmful actions against them. This is just how writing works.

But I think this phenomenon in amateur criticism is a byproduct of subpar or inexperienced critics who don't fully understand what is it that's displeasing them. The example he gave was something like "when we make a sympathetic protagonist so their arc can be more tragic, and then people point out that we're only making them more sympathetic so their arc can be more tragic, as if that's a bad thing".

The thing is: when a beginner critic says that, they might believe that identifying the tool itself is the problem, but subconsciously their real complaint is the tool failed for them. The idea isn't that the tool itself is flawed, or that identifying the tool makes it not work. The idea is that the tool was not well implemented. Without the proper knowledge and experience in criticism, amateurs might conflate this negative response with "I saw through the writer's facade, they're doing x and y, that's bad!".

When someone says "this is manipulative!" about a story, what they're really saying is usually "this failed to manipulate me!".

Critics with more experience and knowledge can more easily pinpoint why the tool doesn't work, and criticize the root cause instead. Amateur critics mistake the tool itself for the flaw, but both criticisms are tackling a flaw in the text. The problem isn't the amateur critic, it's in the text. It's just that one group makes better criticism than the other.

Which makes Nolan's argument just "professional [x]s are better at [x] than amateur [x]s", which while true, is not a very deep or insightful statement.