It was a big mistake for the New York Times to ask Renata Adler to replace Bosley Crowther as the paper's movie critic in 1967, and a small disaster for Miss Adler (or Renata, as she became known to the thousands who started following her daily mistakes, laxities of prose, insights and oversights, in a cliffhanging "Perils of Renata" that was usually resolved by Miss Adler's falling off her critical or rhetorical cliff) to have accepted. Somebody at the Times must have heard that movies were fashionable, and thought to bestow a little cultural respectability on a medium it had previously recognized mainly as an advertiser….

What nobody seemed to notice was that Renata didn't know much about movies, didn't care much about them, and didn't care to write much about them. At a time when there were far more interested, interesting film critics around (and the Times could...