Although it's tempting to assume that a film devoted to the representation of an objective reality would suffer stylistically, French film critic Andre Bazin would say otherwise. Bazin craved a cinema of truth, one whose success depended on a director's finely tuned, disinterested observation.
Andrew Sarris served as film critic for the Village Voice for almost 30 years and as the editor of the English-language version of the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, but he is best known as the primary spokesman for the "politique des auteurs" -- or auteur theory.
Prior to the
"I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic," wrote Pauline Kael, the undisputed queen of journalistic film criticism.
Born in tiny Petaluma, California, Kael went