She was hungry, so she ate the bread. She devoured the bread. In a sense, of course, they're right. The point of a good revision isn't to preserve every particle of the original passage, but to be true to the original's core intended meaning. The final revision deletes she was hungry because the verb devours implies as much.
Students sometimes resist plainness because they're too eager to spill all their ideas right away.
Her sentence bristles with nouns, adjective and adverbs. It has too many ideas going in too many directions at once. The solution is to simplify by cutting to the core of the argument. Readers can't focus on everything at once, and a skillful writer should quietly guide the reader to where she wants the most attention paid. There will be time later on to discuss the film's qualities in detail.