We get peevish when commentators say uncomplimentary things about movies we revere. It’s like hearing someone bad-mouth an old friend. But I’ve learned a lot from critics. They are, of course, better informed than the average fan. They can send you to all sorts of movies that would otherwise not show up on your radar. They can also provide you new angles of approach to movies with which you're already familiar.

Critics are not a unit. There are all sorts of critics. If, on the Web, you go to Senses of Cinema (a wonderful site), you get, as the title suggests, a more or less academic approach, the take from people who have studied film and film theory. Then there are reviewers like Roger Ebert and Leonard Malten, who are much less platonic. I mean, they talk about movies rather than the idea of movies. Then there are the specialists. In the context of Dark Energy, these are commentators like Alain Silver and Eddie Muller - each with an approach quite different from the other - who have zeroed in on Noir and helped make it meaningful to contemporary audiences. If you go on fine tuning, you will discover that each reviewer has his or her own take (compare influential writers Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris). There is no unanimous agreement on anything.

In babble, the often negative tone I adopt toward criticism is specific in its intention; it’s aimed at the notion that there is a universal standard against which movies can be compared. True, there are points of view that dominate film criticism at any given moment, but they get dumped. They may come back; they may not. If they do, in a turn of the clock they’ll be dumped again.

Although it stands to reason most humans have an instinctual feeling their judgments are rooted in truth, the insistence on nailing it down comes mostly from evangelicals and certain academics. Regarding the academic approach, I think the idea is that, as a student in the postmodern environment, one studies life. You study not just literature but psychology, history, political science, and so on, so that you can put the subject of your attention in a wider context. This leads some critics to say of some directors, "He knows too much about movies and not enough about life," or words to that effect. I think maybe they mean that the director in question does not appear to have taken the academic curriculum that would qualify him or her to know about life. Keep in mind, most movie critics are not film-school people. They tend to be lit-school people.

I applaud anyone who opens themselves to all that information, but as to whether or not such a person can legitimately claim to know more about life than, let's say, the average streetwalker who spends her professional existence second-guessing the whims of a wide range of customers, I doubt it.

A more old-fashioned, but still very serviceable approach, insists that there are eternal verities, and a commentator wishing to invoke them will call upon tradition and authority of one sort or another. Meanwhile, another commentator calls upon a different interpretation of that same tradition, and insults are exchanged.

And, of course, when you've gone on for as long as I have in this essay, any salvo directed at critics or commentators will find you standing in your own line of fire.