Did Roger Ebert Kill Film Criticism? Globe Says Thumbs Up, We Say Thumbs Down

Chris Jones' new profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire is excellent and often touching. And very few film websites are better than Ebert's blog, home to some of the most impressive and incisive reviews on the web. So we don't understand why the Globe's "MovieNation" is using the profile as a reason to sound a death knell for film criticism, especially since they actually employ some of the best critics out there (including Ty Burr and Wesley Morris).

The Globe's argument goes something like this: Roger Ebert the writer is great, but TV is stupid, so "thumbs up, thumbs down" is the inadvertent force that ended the age when critics were critics (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, etc.) and people paid attention to anything but the most superficial.

There might actually be a little something to this theory. Siskel and Ebert demystified the craft of movie reviewing, opening it up to an ever larger audience by making the viewers feel a part of the conversation. Perhaps the critiques became a little less technical, but, the critic now had a wider audience.

Still, we prefer to think that the main element killing serious film criticism (and we've gone far Beyond Thumbs Up ourselves, previously) is that there are just too many movies. The need to review multiple films every week detracts from quality, minimizing the ability to delve into a given film. This week on "At the Movies," A. O. Scott and Michael Phillips reviewed only "Shutter Island" and "The Ghost Writer" and the result was staggering: two full and articulate reviews that placed the movies within the context of their directors respective careers, pointing out thematic connections and visual references when appropriate. It was about as insightful as film reviews get, no matter the format.

The irony of it all that "Movie Nation" is a terrific supplement to the print reviews, pointing out movies that otherwise would go unnoticed, the repertory films that make Boston (well, Cambridge) so interesting. If anything, the intimacy of their website changes and elevates the act of criticism just as it's supposedly dying, making the readers an actual part of the conversation instead of an imagined one.