Are they still relevant? Everyone's a critic.

Of course, once you see the movie and realize how awful it is, there's a new thought in your head: "Once bitten, twice shy." By turning us into cynics, studios have encouraged us to distrust critics. Unless you are willing to put in the time to rank dozens upon dozens of critics in your head (Wireless Magazines' Earl Dittman [hack] vs. the New York Times' A.O. Scott [smart guy]), most sensible filmgoers simply ignore the blurbs altogether.

There are, of course, still plenty of serious critics, but the studios do their best to prevent them from writing about their mainstream fare. At People magazine, for example, film critic Leah Rozen has a Monday deadline to get reviews into an issue that hits newsstands on Friday. Even though she works for a publication that would be ideal to promote the family-oriented "Nim's Island," which opened Friday, Rozen says that 20th Century Fox didn't screen the film for People and other New York-based critics until noon Thursday.

"The studio knows what our deadlines are," she said. "So I assume they knew if they screened it then, we wouldn't be able to review it."

To be fair, the media is also responsible for undermining its critics' authority. Scores of TV's film critics have become quote whores, willing to say anything ("Awesome!" Fox TV's Shawn Edwards enthused about the woeful "Drillbit Taylor") to get their names atop movie ads. The news weeklies often devalue their star critics by using them to deliver exclusive interviews with big-shot filmmakers, allowing the studios to create some much-needed aura-by-association for their summer blockbusters. At all too many newspapers, the emergence of various service-oriented sections has created a thumbs-up or -down mentality. As Rozen explains: "Editors everywhere have been affected by the influence of service journalism to the point where you find them asking why critics are going on at such length when all the readers really want to know is -- should they go to the movie or not?" Rozen says every time there's a redesign at People, the pictures get bigger and the text hole gets smaller. "Put it this way," she says, referring to one of the most critically heralded movies of last year. "I reviewed 'Eastern Promises' in two sentences."