Yesterday, I sat through a screening of the new Robert De Niro movie, Fifteen Minutes. It won't open for several weeks yet, but its distributor, New Line, has requested that no reviews appear before the film opens--and with the publishing schedules for most weeklies and daily papers printing reviews on late Thursday or Friday, that effectively means there will be no advance comment on Fifteen Minutes. (In fact, you'll have to wait five days after the film's Seattle premiere to know whether I like the movie or consider it a ludicrously written, histrionically acted, utterly ridiculous, and hypocritical piece of garbage.) MGM hasn't even done us the courtesy of requesting a delay in writing up Hannibal; the most anticipated big studio film of the season won't be shown until after our deadline has passed. This behavior of blacking out the press, long standard for films the studios have little hope in beyond a strong first weekend fueled by incessant ads (Sugar & Spice was never screened for critics; the slasher flick Valentine is being shown the night before it opens), has increasingly become standard practice for even high-profile releases. Not, I'm convinced, because Hollywood is desperate to avoid bad reviews (could even the most scathing condemnations hinder Dr. Lecter's return to movie screens?), but because the big producers have sat down, weighed the costs and balances, and finally come to the realization that film critics are wholly expendable.

That may seem a mercenary conclusion, even for Hollywood, but film critics have made it an easy one to reach. Film sprang up full born as a demotic art, initially without even the division between balconied gentry and rowdy groundlings that defined the theater; washerwomen and magnates peeped through the same nickelodeon, sat in the same rows. As a result, film criticism has always been less of a debate than a consumer guide. Opinions on a film's merits were given, but more important, all the information was laid out in a convenient fashion for you, the moviegoer, to determine how your money could best be spent. I have never read a book review suggesting you wait for the paperback, or one for music that advises picking up the CD when it hits the secondhand stores, but "catch it on a matinee" is practically a mantra for film critics.

Stuck in this mindset, it became natural that the only films that mattered were the ones that had just opened, that the audience might wish to attend over the weekend. No matter that a particularly intriguing reading of a movie may have suggested itself after a second viewing some weeks later, or (more often the case by far) that a film is just so daft and empty-headed that there is no good reason to notice it at all; the only criterion for getting a movie reviewed is that is has begun to play in theaters. Some years ago critic David Thomson led a roundtable discussion in Seattle; when one member of the audience rose and complained about insufficient coverage given to "independent" films, there was much self-satisfied murmuring of agreement among the crowd. Thomson let it play out, then opined that we are in fact far too generous in our coverage of movies. No one expects a review for every book, yet each Friday it is considered obligatory that each and every film, be it Iranian drama, arty documentary, or buddy-cop shoot 'em up, be accorded a plot summary, a rundown of the cast, a studio-selected photo of the movie's stars, and, if they can be fit into the allotted few hundred words, a line or three of analysis.

The one defense we film critics could use to justify our continued existence--our knowledge, our access to information--has grown increasingly irrelevant, both with the recent, unprecedented explosion of available reference materials and with the bewildering profusion of production, which has made a thorough familiarity with the totality of even an infant art form such as film impossible. Anyone can be a critic, as fans have always grumbled when reading a slam of their favorite movie. Now, for the first time, the platitude is true. This, however, has so far been a salutary development; for all the jokes one hears about illiterate posts on sites such as the Internet Movie Database or Amazon, the majority are quite thoughtful, well-written, and engagingly advocatory--not to mention far less beholden to marketplace priorities. It is now a matter of a few moments of clicking and pointing to learn, for instance, that Fifteen Minutes is the work of the former TV hack responsible for 2 Days in the Valley, that the film's release has been delayed many times (never a good sign), and that the plot on its surface seems fairly ludicrous. We're fortunately long past needing me or anyone else to point these things out to you.