What’s with all this chatter about whether critics matter? “The notion that a critic’s job begins and ends with our power to help films become hits is a specious one nurtured by marketing executives, and I’m always astonished when critics themselves buy into it. Consider the comparable situation with, say, political pundits. Should an editorial columnist who was stauchly against the Iraq war, and had no discernible influence on either the Congress or political opinion at large, be considered ‘irrelevant’? Was the war itself ‘columnist-proof’?”