Far more is released each week than any publication can cover, so review selection is a resource allocation problem. The decision is made against staff capacity and expected readership rather than merit.
Capacity is the first constraint
A review requires watching the work, writing, editing and publishing, and a critic can only do so many in a week. The available slots are known before the releases are.
Staff sizes have contracted across most outlets, which has reduced the number of works that receive any professional attention at all.
The result is that coverage concentrates on titles most likely to be searched for, and mid-budget releases without a marketing push are the ones that disappear. A film with no campaign is often invisible to the outlets as well as to the audience.
Access determines timing more than choice
Distributors control when critics see a film through screenings and secured links, and coverage cannot precede that access.
A title held back from press until release day will be reviewed late or not at all, since the moment of maximum reader interest has already passed.
Editors read that withholding as information, and a film not shown in advance is widely understood to be one the distributor expects to be criticized.
Reader interest is measured, not guessed
Outlets track which reviews are read, and that history informs future assignments. Coverage follows demonstrated demand more closely than it did before traffic was measurable.
Search behavior around a release is visible in advance, since audiences look for information before deciding, and that signal shapes what gets scheduled.
This produces a feedback effect where covered categories accumulate readers and uncovered ones are progressively harder to justify covering. Coverage gaps widen rather than correct themselves.
Specialization decides who gets assigned
Editors match a work to a critic with relevant knowledge, because a reviewer unfamiliar with a genre's conventions produces a review its likely readers cannot use.
Assigning a hostile critic to a genre generates a piece that says more about the assignment than the work, which most editors regard as a waste of a slot.
Where an outlet publishes a negative review, the useful question is whether the critic engaged with what the work was attempting.
Independent coverage fills the gap unevenly
Smaller releases now depend on individual critics, newsletters and channels, which collectively cover far more than staffed outlets do.
That coverage is harder to find, since it lacks the search visibility of established publications and is scattered across platforms.
A work therefore can be well reviewed in a real sense while appearing, to anyone searching casually, to have been ignored entirely. The reviews exist; the distribution that once carried them does not.