Yet the movie’s a lively and important first step in assaying the worth of a field on the verge of extinction, as more and more professional reviewers are let go from struggling news organizations (nearly 60 in the past 3 1/2 years). Yes, yes: Cry me a river. The question bears asking, though. What can the better working critics offer to a world where everyone is digitally empowered to give an opinion? It depends on whether you think context, clarity, and a broad understanding of film history, world history, and culture are important.
(Caveat: This review is hopelessly biased, obviously, since I’m one of those dinosaurs myself, Peary is a personal friend, and my Globe colleague Wesley Morris appears in “For the Love of Movies,’’ along with such other professional acquaintances as A.O. Scott, Lisa Schwarzbaum, and Roger Ebert. The experience is not unlike a food critic being asked to review a meal cooked by his mom. If I’ve had better meatloaf, I’m certainly not going to spit it across the room.)
Besides, this is a meal no one has ever cooked before: an affectionate, knowledgeable overview of film criticism from the silent era to the Internet. Via his narrator, actress Patricia Clarkson, Peary picks out the key figures in the development of thinking and writing about movies, from poet Vachel Lindsay in the 1920s through the great Otis Ferguson, his career cut short by WWII, to Manny Farber, James Agee, and the arrival of the French auteurists and their American counterparts in the 1960s.
“For the Love of Movies’’ spends a lot of time on the latter era, and for good reason: The movies were great, the writing was spectacular, and millions were reading it. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael appeared on the scene like the Elvis Presley of film criticism, electrifying readers with vibrant prose and punchy opinions. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Owen Gleiberman rightly thumbnails Kael as Dionysian and her chief rival, Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, as Apollonian; the aging Sarris dissects their decades-long feud with the weary humor of a survivor.
