Film Critic

LET'S BAN movie critics from reviewing historical films. That way, we'll make their lives - and ours - easier to sit through. Film criticism is a noble profession, focusing on an exciting and vibrant art form. But critics and I often are on different wavelengths. Any film universally panned by critics, I'm sure to like. Those that most critics praise, I'm sure to detest. I first became leery of critics years ago, when I went to see "Picnic at Hanging Rock" at the Charles. The plot was about three girls who mysteriously disappear on a picnic.

Martin Scorsese didn't make a 4 1/2-hour documentary about the movies to show us more scenes from "Gone With the Wind" or "Casablanca." Scores of film historians have already been there and done that. Instead, "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies," making its television premiere tonight through Wednesday on TCM, concentrates on films that may have slipped through the cracks, and on directors whose careers were too brief to leave a lasting impact or whose work has been unjustly ignored by the masses.

Don't trust the critics about the latest movies? Don't want to blindly follow the crowd to the current No. 1 box-office hit? Then you might be interested in a new Internet service that will tell you on Saturday morning how people your age, and your gender, responded to a movie that opened the night before.Cinemascore, Inc., a Las Vegas-based company that has been providing opening-weekend exit-poll data to the media and the movie industry for nearly two decades, is now not only putting the results on its free Web site -- www.cinemascore.

CHICAGO -- The balcony is still open.Five months after Gene Siskel's death, Roger Ebert continues to give the thumbs-up and thumbs-down from the faux movie perch he shared with his film-critic partner for 24 years. Each week he still tapes "Siskel & Ebert," but now with a rotating set of guest critics. He continues to crank out numerous reviews and feature stories for the Chicago Sun-Times, to publish books and host film festivals. Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who was "Siskel & Ebert's" first guest critic when Siskel fell ill with brain cancer, describes Ebert as "possessed."

What is film noir? Is it a look? An era? A mood?Probably, it's all of the above, but TCM will explore the question to its fullest this summer with "Summer of Darkness," a 94-film series of classic noir films that begins Friday with a triumvirate of noir classics: "The Maltese Falcon" at 8 p.m., followed by "In a Lonely Place" at 10 and "High Sierra" at midnight.The series provides a good chance for fans to catch up on familiar favorites and discover overlooked gems. Some rarely seen movies include "Detour," by master of the form Edgar G. Ulmer; the heartbreaking "Woman in the Window," starring Edward G. Robinson; and Stanley Kubrick's "The Kill-ing," which features Sterling Hayden in a taut, nerve-rattling thriller.

Gene Siskel was not the most respected of American movie critics; he wasn't even the most accomplished half of "Siskel & Ebert" -- after all, Roger was the one with the Pulitzer Prize.But Siskel had an intense love for movies, a passion that made him as much fan as critic. He once owned the suit John Travolta wore in "Saturday Night Fever" and, for a wedding present, gave colleague Ebert Harpo Marx's horn. And his opinions were neither lowbrow nor high; if his yearly best-film picks included such critical darlings as 1997's "The Ice Storm," 1988's "The Last Temptation of Christ" and 1975's "Nashville," he was just as sincere in defending his pick for 1998, the box-office dud (and critically ignored)

In a world of cinema increasingly dominated by films long on high-budget special effects and short on artistic merit, Cinema Sundays at the Charles provides the rare opportunity to enjoy first-rate independent films and then discuss them with distinguished experts.This season's series begins Feb. 1 with "The Apostle," the story of a cunning and complicated preacher in Louisiana, starring and produced by Robert Duvall. Film critic and frequent guest speaker Eddie Cockrell will be the moderator.

"Clint Eastwood: A Biography" by Richard Schickel. Knopf. 537 pages. $26.Eschewing the predictable Hollywood formulas of Spielberg or the avant-garde self-consciousness of Scorsese and Coppola, Clint Eastwood, in ""The Outlaw Josey Wales," ""Unforgiven" and ""Bridges of Madison County," has become a major film director. The actor who first was seen in Sergio Leone's ""spaghetti Westerns" and then as Dirty Harry, the rogue cop at war with the Constitution, has be come an auteur of grace and craft.

WE ARE ON the trans-Siberian railroad in December, a few days before last year's Russian parliamentary elections that would revive the once sagging fortunes of Soviet communism.Natalya Slesarenko, a pensioner, by chance has found herself in the same third-class car with an American who would like to know what she thinks of the coming elections. She is illiterate, but has always voted as far back as she can remember. She will vote this time, too, probably for the Communists as she always has before.

R. H. "Hal" Gardner, an author and retired theater and film critic for The Sun, died of leukemia at his West University Parkway home yesterday. He was 76.For exactly 33 years until his 1984 retirement, the Kentucky boy who fell in love with Baltimore delighted, advised and occasionally enraged Sun readers with his essays on the city's entertainment world.He sat his readers next to stars such as Melvyn Douglas and Tallulah Bankhead, he put them at a table at Morris Martick's cafe on West Mulberry Street, and he put them in touch with a distinct character, pool-hall philosopher Lorry Quackenbush.