At the San Diego Reader, Shepherd awarded a "priority" to movies from one to five stars, with "antipathies" receiving a black spot.
Many of the directors and producers Farber championed in Negative Space are favored by Shepherd as well, including Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People, a 5-star rated film[8]), Preston Sturges, Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, Contempt), Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel) and Nicolas Roeg (Cold Heaven).
Also, the "long-neglected" action directors found in Farber's famous "Underground Films" essay from 1957: e.g., Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Robert Wise ("a sometime member of the underground"), John Farrow (The Big Clock, 5 stars[9]) and Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly[10] and Ulzana's Raid,[11] both 5 stars).
A chief concern of Shepherd's is cinematography,[12] which he frequently commented on in his column using descriptive language (he did not care for the "dingy, dungeony image" of the Academy Award-winning Chicago, for example.
The then-state-of-the-art digital video found in George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, for example, is "somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener.