Andrew Sarris
Photo: Cinema Then, Cinema Now; CUNY TV · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
The Village Voice critic who imported the auteur theory to America and, in The American Cinema (1968), ranked its directors with a taxonomist's nerve — 'Pantheon' and all. His decades-long argument with Pauline Kael over authorship versus experience is the closest American criticism has come to a founding debate, and both sides are still being taken.