Obviously both radio plays (no visual-- too bad we don't have more of these lately, and we're stuck with audiobooks as a mediocre facsimile) and silent films (no sound) can work extraordinarily well.

Good film uses both to its maximal advantage.

> I'd go so far as to say, any time a movie resorts to backstory-monologues or text, the director has failed.

I disagree. You can find lots of bad examples of this, but you can also find masterful tricks of unreliable narration (Memento); you can find simple context-setting for a foreign environment (Star Wars); you have stories that leap through time that would be impractical to show all of the events and require some text or narration so the viewer knows what's up.

Basically all of the rules of thumb really mean "this is often misused" and are not prescriptive.

The viewer could figure out backstory with a few well-placed references in dialog, or from clues as the story advances. In fact, Star Wars gave us those clues anyway, so the title scrolling into the distance wasn't even useful that way.

When a director uses bad movie tropes for their own sake, that's one thing. But using them instead of directing a good narrative, that's lazy and a squandered opportunity to show us a better movie.

And yes, the radio show example is good. They needed to do lots of dialog, because that was the medium; they had one hand (both hands?) tied behind their back.

But in a movie, shutting down the visuals for a static backstory dialog is almost always a mistake. Because you can be doing so much more than that!

Not bad, simply low-brow, which is not the same.

And what about Memento? It simply doesn't work without dialogue, and it's a wonderful movie.