This article provides an overview of the Fifty Shades of Grey reviews published in the popular press at the time of the film’s release on Valentine’s Day Weekend 2015. As Rick Altman argues, critics are responsible for commenting upon and conserving film genres (124), thus determining the consensus on the film’s genre interventions highlights the ones that are pressing and relevant in contemporary criticism. Through a careful look at the reviews, I assess which genre references resonated with critics. In my reading of the Fifty Shades criticism, given that the film was neither art, nor porn, nor schlock, the only low genre left for critics to assess it was the “woman’s film.” The woman’s film designation allowed critics to denigrate the film and provide disparaging commentary about it to thereby prop up their authority and demonstrate their good taste. This follows from the view that criticism is in a state of perpetual crisis over its claims to authority and legitimacy and, in the digital era, this state of anxiety is all the more pressing as fans post reviews on a host of websites (Frey, Permanent Crisis 125-139). There is no shortage of websites that allow for competition among amateur critics, e.g., review sites such as Letterboxd and Metacritic, and social media such Twitter. For critics, then, genre comparisons and investigations are not deployed to simply better understand a film, its production, or reception. Indeed, the appearance of a carefully constructed genre study evinces a critic’s cultural capital. However, the Fifty Shades critics reinforced and reproduced the distinction between high and low genres while neglecting to provide more nuanced reflections on genre filmmaking, the pleasures of genre film spectatorship, and the film’s problematic representations of contemporary romance.