The best thing that came out of last week’s online fracas over assorted critics’ response to “Inception” was a brief swell in useful conversation about critical nuance and responsibility. On Thursday, I touched on the Rotten Tomatoes-trained tendency of many readers to box film criticism into distinct ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps, and as far as I’m concerned, US-based British writer Tom Shone has pretty much the last word on the matter. Responding to a Sasha Stone post about the blogger/critic divide, Shone writes:
The blogger/critic dust-up over Inception illustrates the divide between those who for whom love of a film means nothing less than full-throated devotion, coupled with a blindness to all its flaws — a kind of creeping politesse that insists on nary a bad word be said of the great and the good. The kind of writer for whom the words “genius” and “masterpiece” silence all internal debate. And those whose admiration for a film or filmmaker comes striated with a sense of its imperfections, who see no contradiction between loving a film and finding fault with it — the faults peg their admiration higher. The blogosphere seems sometimes to forget this. They mistake reverence for respect. They’re strangely pious. Again: where are the outlaws?
I have nothing further. (P.S. He likes “Inception” just fine.)
If you keep up with the American critical scene, you’ll probably have got the message by now that people kinda like 
Regular readers will know that there is no current film writer, great or small, whom I look up to more than Nick Davis — a Chicago-based English professor whose blogging balances rich academic perspective with truly heroic levels of Oscar geekdom.
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