There were a lot of things I was supposed to do when I got home tonight from an early screening of Enchanted (now there is a movie that is going to make some serious money this holiday season), including working on my review of American Gangsters (Denzel and Russell together? Yeah, yeah. What about Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh together in Margot at the Wedding? Why isn’t everybody excited about…Oh right, not men.) and watching a DVD of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Oh, and there’s a pile of laundry that needs folding too…But what did I do? I turned on the TV and settled down to the season finale of Californication, a show I have had doubts about since Episode Two but have nonetheless watched every minute of.

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Writing in Slate this week, Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris makes a compelling argument for Lionsgate to start screening Tyler Perry’s movies for critics again. The studio stopped after “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” which Perry wrote and starred in, got lambasted by everyone from Ebert to Morris himself (“Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety” he wrote of the film’s message in his 2005 review). In his Slate piece, Morris calls the no-screening process discriminatory and unfair to Perry himself. “Keeping Perry away from the press reinforces the notion among critics that he doesn’t matter,” he writes.

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I get a lot of questions from readers about how I do my job. So here are the nuts and bolts of movie criticism in the Bay Area.

Q: When and how do you see a movie?
A: Three different ways. Many of them I see at daytime screenings for critics, either at a screening in one of the city’s main theaters (the Metreon, the AMC 1000, the new City Centre or the Kabuki) or at the Variety Club, which is a small, private screening room. Others I see at advance screenings — often hosted by a local radio station — that are technically for members of the public who’ve obtained invites, but that also serve as a convenient way for critics to see the movie. Those screenings are all at night, usually on Mondays or Tuesdays. Some movies, mainly documentaries or foreign films, I might watch at home on a DVD screener supplied to me by the distributor.

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