A Favorite Critic

There's a nice article up at the New York Times online today about the film critic Andrew Sarris, and his role in shaping cinephilia in this country going back to the 1950s. I've been reading Sarris for thirty years, starting back when he and Robert Christgau gave me a reason to buy the Village Voice every week, and have found his reviews to be almost without fail both entertaining and insightful, even when I didn't necessarily agree with him about a particular film's worth. His American Cinema has been my reference of choice for quick information about almost anything made prior to 1968, and when I spotted his Confessions of a Cultist on the shelf of a used book store some years back, I snapped that up too. Recently, he was let go by the New York Observer as their on-staff reviewer (due to economic factors, apparently), and that seems to bring to an end my weekly access to his ongoing love-letters to the movies. It's another terrible example of where print journalism is heading, with arts writers seeming among the first on the chopping block. But at least it appears that Sarris will continue to contribute to Film Comment, and of course, I still have the wonderful books to re-visit whenever I want a dose of his especially humanistic approach to film.