Best critics keep all of us honest

In case you haven't heard, criticism is under attack. And so far, the body count among film critics is high.

Between 2006 and now, more than 30 film critics of all types all over the country have quit, retired, been laid off, accepted buyouts or been reassigned. With the myriad reports of print journalism going through an Internet-induced, ad revenue-depleted, downward spiral, critics of all forms of arts and leisure -- movies, books, music, dance -- have been among the first to get the ax.

So far this year, film critics have been exiting at an alarming rate. In March, veteran Newsweek critic David Ansen and New York Newsday critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour accepted buyouts, while the independent Village Voice's Nathan Lee was laid off. In May, The Washington Post's head critics, Stephen Hunter and Desson Thomson, accepted buyouts and left their positions.

It's gotten so bad that Matt Zoller Seitz, respected critic for The New York Times and the man behind the online film-discussion blog "The House Next Door," took himself out of the criticism game in April, opting to focus full-time on filmmaking. (His position at the Times has now been filled by Nathan Lee.)

Since I am, too, a film critic, this is an issue I treat with great concern. But not only because there's a possibility I could lose my job. I'm also concerned that if print film critics are relieved of their duties -- by those who think our opinions aren't that important or are easily replaceable by another, less expensive writer somewhere else -- the lack of serious discourse about film in the media will disappear as well.

At this point, some of you are probably saying, "So what? I can form my own opinion about a movie. I don't need film critics to form one for me. Good riddance." I know there have been people who've read my work over the years who've bluntly let me know, through e-mail or (often anonymous) phone calls, that they don't need me to dictate their cinematic tastes.

Let me just say that it's not my intention to do so.

It's a film critic's job to form his own opinion about a movie, not yours. If you see a movie a critic has reviewed and you agree with that critic's opinion, great. If you don't, even better. Because that is truly the goal of criticism: to get the ball rolling.

Once bracing, now bland

Arts criticism has been an essential component in print (and society), going back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when writers such as Denis Diderot, Emile Zola and Charles Baudelaire acted as art critics, writing essays that dispensed analysis, insight, understanding and, every so often, enlightenment.

As for film critics, they've been around since the creation of film print. Revered Midwestern poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg did time as silent movie-era critics, churning out reviews and essays in the early 20th century. Esteemed novelists Graham Greene and James Agee began writing movie reviews in periodicals in the '30s and '40s. Former Winston-Salem resident Bosley Crowther was at one point the country's most-known newspaper critic, filing reviews for The New York Times from the '40s to the '60s.

Several critics would go on to shape cinema. Before making revolutionary silent foreign films such as "The Battleship Potemkin," Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was a noted film theorist in the '20s. In the '50s, the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, co-founded by renowned critic/theorist Andre Bazin, had a masthead that included the men who would form the French New Wave -- Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, etc.