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Critical mass: 'monster' and the dirty little secrets of movie reviewers.

Article Excerpt
AS EVERYONE knows, the movie year is collapsed into a stretch of two or three months that's part traffic jam, part political campaign. If the Oscars are the final election, with the various guild awards the nominating conventions, the primaries are the critics' awards that pretend to clarify the blizzard of reviews that accompanies the blizzard of films. Just how sophisticated moviegoers in L.A. have gotten about navigating reviews--reading the fine print under the ad blurbs to see exactly which junketeer or Alaskan radio station is throwing around all those exclamation points on behalf of Mona Lisa Smile--may not always be clear. Still, sometimes the polarities must be as bewildering as they are stark. I doubt two critics staked out more extreme positions than did the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert and the Los Angeles Times' Manohla Dargis on Charlize Theron's performance as a prostitute turned serial killer in Monster. Ebert called it "one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema," while Dargis "didn't buy it for a second."

Sometimes critical opinions can be so at odds they all but cancel each other out, which might not be an altogether unhealthy thing. But Ebert and Dargis are two of the most respected critics in the country, each possessed of uncanny wisdom and insight from time to time, which is to say on those occasions when their opinions agree with mine. Of course, alliances can also shift on a dime. On the matter of Theron, in my usual bold take-no-prisoners fashion I come down somewhere between Ebert and Dargis, although given the light-years that separate them, it would be hard to come down anywhere else: While I wasn't convinced Theron's was the greatest performance of...