a working critic other than Ebert." It doesn't help that many of the leading film critics are in their late 50s and 60s and often seem out- of-tune with the much younger people who fill cinemas on opening weekends.

The demise of America's film critics has become a cause for alarm in intellectual circles here. Film criticism, like cinema, has always been taken much more seriously in America than in the UK. No British critic, apart perhaps from Grahame Greene, has ever had the influence of Andrew Sarris, who wrote for the Village Voice for many years, or Pauline Kael (right), who wrote for the New Yorker until the early 1990s.

In the late 1960s, taking his cue from the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Sarris coined and popularised the 'auteur theory', that directors were the most important creative force in filmmaking, and thus helped change the balance of power in Hollywood.

Kael was so influential that director David Lean claimed that her scathing review of Ryan's Daughter stopped him from making another movie for 14 years.

"Not many reviewers have a real gift for effrontery," she once said. "I think that may be my best talent."

But Kael loved to champion low-brow films other intellectuals scorned and her criticism also inspired many of today's biggest names, including Wes Anderson. Many of the current generation of - aging - critics are direct intellectual descendants of Kael, and known as the 'Paulettes' by their enemies.

Patrick Goldstein, writing about the demise of America's movie critics in the Los Angeles Times recently, nostalgically recalled his own youth, when "critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries".

Now people trawl movie blogs, of which there are dozens, for early information about movies, or swarm to sites that aggregate criticism, like rottentomatoes.com and metacritic.com. With the democratising power of the internet at their fingertips, people prefer to find out for themselves what they think rather than be told. I wonder what Pauline Kael would say about that.