Critics see films in advance, so our reviews appear on release day and sometimes earlier. Distributors believe the publicity that critics like me provide is valuable enough to take the risk of negative reviews.

However, about three to four times a month, a distributor releases a film without showing it to the press first. This almost always happens for one of the following six reasons:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much of my work involved watching these films that weren’t being shown. During that time, I saw dozens of the worst films imaginable – horror films like “Pumpkinhead” (1989) with Lance Henriksen, oddball originals like “Any Man’s Death” with Ernest Borgnine as a Nazi war criminal, and silly romantic comedies like “Loverboy” (1989) with Patrick Dempsey.

But amidst all the terrible films, there was occasionally something worth seeing, something good enough to keep me remembering it after all these years. Five films fall into this category for me: Modern Girls (1986), a romantic comedy set in the Los Angeles club scene of the 1980s; True Love (1989), a great film by Nancy Savoca about an incompatible Italian-American couple on the road to marriage and family; Kill Me Again (1989), a brilliant film noir directed by John Dahl; Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), a messy but original film starring Madonna as a 1920s saleswoman; and Whore (1991), a cheesy, bizarre but compelling film starring Ken Russell and my then long-time film love Theresa Russell (no relation to Ken).

Recently I saw another film that I really enjoyed: M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, Trap. In it, Josh Hartnett plays a family man and serial killer who takes his teenage daughter to a rock concert. There are some silly scenes.

Trap is entertaining and well made, so why wasn’t it shown? It’s not awful and doesn’t have a weird plot twist. It’s not political or difficult to market, and the budget is too big to drop. The only remaining possible reason is that the people behind it thought they didn’t need critics.

Trap is expected to gross around $70 million, which isn’t huge, but it’s about in line with Shyamalan’s recent films. If you don’t need the critics, why subject yourself to their criticism? That makes sense.

Still, it seems unfair. Over the years, I’ve had to watch Shyamalan’s worst films – The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013), and Glass (2019). And then, as if I hadn’t suffered enough already, I had to think about them and write about them. He could have at least let me see Trap so I could tell you sooner that this is his best film since The Sixth Sense (1999), which also makes it the best Shyamalan film of the 21st century.