By most accounts, Aaron Sorkin’s new film The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to his 2010 smash-hit The Social Network, is a flop. The film critic Mark Kermode’s response to seeing it was that Sorkin, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest living screenwriters, is “not a great director”.

It seems that Sorkin agrees. Because Sorkin is very famous, he has had to do the rounds talking about the film in the media, which led to his appearance on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast earlier this week, in which he addressed these kind of criticisms head on. “I’m very worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts that you can’t learn,” he said. “In addition to having absorbed none of the science of filmmaking, I have – and this is a problem in a visual medium – I have no visual sensibility at all, it turns out.”

It’s not the first time a director has made a confession in this vein. Sam Raimi, for instance, memorably told the Nerdist podcast in 2014 that the reason Spider-Man 3 sucked is that he “messed up plenty” because he “didn’t really believe........

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