For example, while the obsessive interpretations of The Shining can lend us interesting and fanatical material for a documentary about Shining obsessives, an awful lot of their actual arguments from that film are dead ends, both emotionally and intellectually. Telling me that you think a poster on a wall of a man skiing kind of looks like a Minotaur, and so this supports some labyrinth based theory you have, only tells me you've been staring too closely at the screen. It tells me nothing about the film itself.
There are a lot of film interpretations out there that are similar to this, reading much closer to conspiracy theories than film criticism, primarily interested in simply compiling irrelevant fragments that they think bolster their point. I can't be compelled to care about that kind of scavenger hunt approach to talking about films. I often find it absolutely empty at its core.
I think that there are two different intellectual/emotional aspects at play here.
The first aspect--let's call it Elaborate Theory Building--can seem obnoxious (or, as you note, like a dead end), but I think it's mostly harmless. There can be something thrilling about choosing a lens and then looking at a film through it. When I was watching
Brain Damage, I was surprised to see how soon the relationship between the main character and his girlfriend fractures, and then I watched the whole rest of the film with my "filter" set to see things that seemed relevant to the theme of relationships. It was kind of fun--like a treasure hunt looking for new angles on a film I'd already seen many times before.
But let's call the second aspect the King of Logic. That's more what I think you mean when you say
primarily interested in simply compiling irrelevant fragments that they think bolster their point. I agree that this seems to come from a less "pure" place. It seems more driven by the emotional satisfaction of being right about a piece of art.
There's a protocol we use with our students called "What? So What? Now What?"--it basically breaks down to "What did you see in the text?" (what is literally on the page); "So what?" (why does it matter); and "Now what?" (how does this move us deeper in our understanding or inspire us?).
I think that a lot of the King of Logic types miss out this last part, which is why their criticism/analysis feels more like digging heels in to a point of view than actually trying to approach art with an open mind.
Ultimately, though, I'm not sure that we can write for anyone besides ourselves. When I write movie reviews, they are like 80% for me as a way to process my own thinking. Someone might read them or no one might read them. I definitely agree that we can promote writers who use a form of analysis that is illuminating to the reader, and my favorite writing about movies often feels as though I've been invited to participate in a discussion about the film at hand.