Andrew Sarris, one of the defining voices in modern film criticism, died today from an infection developed after a fall. He was 83.
Sarris rose to prominence in what many refer to as the golden age of film criticism, the 1960s, when the studio system was in decline and the era of the international auteur was on the rise.
Sarris was perhaps the second most known American film critic of his generation, following Pauline Kael. Writing for The Village Voice and The New York Observer, he was a proponent of auteur theory, the influential view of filmmaking originally popularized by French critics in André Bazin’s Cahiers du cinéma.
In addition to his regular criticism, Sarris wrote several books, including The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 and “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film History and Memory 1927-1949.
A much more detailed obituary can be found at The New York Times.
To read over 1,000 of Sarris’ more recent film reviews, click through the links at his Rotten Tomatoes archive page.