If I reference another critic in this blog, it’s usually Roger Ebert.
That’s because he was the most well-known and influential film critic in my lifetime. I loved that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of film but you never felt in his writing that he was being academic about it or, worse, showing off. He was conversational and brilliant at the same time, and he never talked down to his audience.
But he wasn’t the first critic whose work I admired. That was Barry Norman, the wry Brit who hosted a show for years on BBC TV and for me a must see every week when I was teen living in London.
The critics who most influenced my writing were the ones I read in Time Out magazine, even though I never knew their names. Their reviews were 250 word capsules throughout the back of the mag, usually a few dozen of them every issue.
In 2024, Time Out is gone (in print, anyway), and so are Barry and Roger. As is Pauline Kael and a host of other critics who sculpted the tastes of western culture and helped elevate the great films of yore. Changing times and the democratizing of the internet have had their way and now, since everyone had a voice on socials and Letterboxd, few look to a singular expert to offer guidance — and that’s true across lots of art forms. As few film critics are currently making a living by writing about the movies, you’ll find even fewer in music.
People have always loved to hate critics. Sure, on one hand these (mostly white, mostly male) gatekeepers helped to assemble a canon that was exclusionary and elitist, but on the other they used their power to enthuse about artists and filmmakers and encouraged a discussion in the culture about the importance of movies.
Nathan Cohen was one of those critics.
He was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1923 and he died in Toronto in March of 1971, and when he did it was the top story that night on CBC The National. This guy was a film and theatre newspaper critic and a broadcaster with the CBC. I first read about Cohen in this fascinating article by Carl Wilson in The Local, and invited Mr Wilson and Halifax film producer and historian Ron Foley Macdonald onto CBC Information Morning to tell me more about Mr Cohen’s life and outsized influence.
