Everyone's a critic: Don't shed any tears for cinephilia.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Film criticism

DIDN'T LIKE BRAVEHEART? You have a soulmate in cyberspace, and he posted his thoughts on a now-defunct interactive Web site. "I know it has won an oscar," he writes, "but I think it's too long and too bloody, I had to be covering my eyes every time. I also think that the guy (Brave Heart) shouldn't have been killed because what's the point of seeing a 3 hour movie full of blood that will end up with the main character dead."

Didn't like Amelie? You have a soulmate in Baltimore, and he writes for the local newspaper. On the eve of the Academy Awards, The Sun's Michael Sragow noted that the popular French fantasy, up for five Oscars, was a "comedy about an introvert" that nonetheless used a "wildly extroverted plot and style." For that reason, he concluded, it was "100 percent inauthentic."

The first critic is inarticulate and ill-informed, but is expressing his honest reaction to a movie. The second critic--one of the foremost in the country--is articulate and well-read, but is offering a flowery non sequitor. He'd be better off muttering that he just doesn't care for this sort of picture.

Criticism is reputed to be dead, film criticism especially so. A few years ago, Susan Sontag complained that cinephilia--"not simply love of but a certain taste in films"--is dying, and with it the idea "that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences." Other critics repeated the charge, each evincing nostalgia for the filmgoing culture of the early to mid-19 60s, when reviews as well as movies could spark heated debates. Now Raymond Haberski gives us It's Only a Movie! (University Press of Kentucky), which traces the whole history of American film criticism but reserves its closest attention for the cinephile era, and especially for the debates between two prominent critics of the day, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael.

There is another way to look at the period in question: not as the last gasp of film appreciation, but as the turning point toward the way we watch film now. At the beginning of the century, as Haberski's history underscores, "photoplay" critics were overwhelmingly concerned with cinema's capacity to improve its audience--and, conversely, with the ways "coarse" movies might lead them astray. The most fervent film critics were, arguably, the censors. With the power to review and alter movies before they were even released, Motion Picture Code enforcer Joseph Breen had an influence that more than one critic today might envy. (For extra...