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It’s undeniably true that the Golden Age of film criticism is long gone. As Jerry Roberts points out in his recent book The Complete History of American Film Criticism, film critics had their heyday in the 1970s, when their mandate was clear expose cheap sentimentalism, champion art-house and independent films, and be unafraid to say that most movies, like most TV shows, most plays, and most other pieces of art, were pure dreck. Newspapers tripped all over themselves to hire new film critics (such as Siskel and Ebert, David Elliott, and Malcolm Johnson) and universities began to offer courses in film, while established critics started looking back on film’s past to write “revisionist criticism” — for example, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker eviscerated Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as “a shallow masterpiece.” And criticism could influence the film industry itself: in 1988, Anne Thompson of The New York Times found that reviews in four publications — the Times itself, New York Magazine, TIME, and Newsweek — could make or break a movie’s box office run, and film executives purposefully released bad films during weeks when Vincent Canby of The New York Times was on vacation, to avoid the guaranteed hit to their box office totals that a critical evisceration would entail.