An interview with AA Gill that appeared in Thursday�s Guardian took what might be called a revisionist approach to its subject. That�s to say that the interviewer tried to persuade the reader that the Sunday Times� journalist and critic is not quite the jerk one would assume him to be.Actually, I have to admit that on a Sunday morning, if I�m reading the Sunday Times online (why buy it? For the Style supplement?), I�ll usually make a beeline for Gill�s TV column. Yes, there�s occasionally a streak of repellent malice in his prose. His comments about those he finds lacking adequate pulchritude, particularly middle-aged women, are sometimes creepily convoluted, as though he spent all week trying to deliver the most annihilating insult possible. Yet there�s a confident rhythm to his writing–full of similes and generalisations that work perfectly on first reading but might not bear up under scrutiny–that carries the reader along to the last sentence of the final paragraph without them fully realizing that they profoundly disagree with about 90% of the opinions expounded in the previous 1,000 words. (BTW, The account of his visit to Iraq, while startlingly apolitical, was a very strong piece of sensory-attuned reportage) Unfortunately, because Gill is an entertaining stylist, this also makes him a fairly average critic. Any manifestation of earnestness would salt the mirror-slick surface of his prose. A real engagement with the medium would halt the flow of gags, which in turn might make the reader ask a fatal question: where are the ideas here?This is also the problem with another critic known for-�let�s be generous here�-his waspish aesthetic. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker is one of the most influential film critics in the world. But you get the impression�-as with Gill and television�-that he doesn�t really love the medium he critiques. For Lane, cinema seems just the most convenient platform upon which he can demonstrate his linguistic expertise and perform his repertoire of Richard Gere jokes (Some of which are good, it has to be said: “I was happy to salute him as a robotic fornicator in �American Gigolo,� but, given that his sole means of signalling brain activity is to go very still and shut his eyes, the world of academia may not be his patch.”)Indeed, I sometimes think Lane prefers bad movies to good ones�the former being better punchbags on which he can whale on to the soundtrack of readers� guffaws. Of course, earlier critics were not immune to gags. Think of Pauline Kael describing Kevin Costner�s pious Western as Dancing with Cameras. Yet at the same time, you got the impression that, for Kael, movies were about as insignificant as oxygen. And earnestness, that stance which you adopt at risk of looking of fool, was fearlessly displayed when Kael compared Bernardo Bertolucci�s Last Tango in Paris to the Paris premiere of Stravinsky�s Rites of Spring.Maybe it’s the films today, but I can�t see Anthony Lane ever putting himself on the line in the same way.I�ve just picked out two particularly high-profile examples of contemporary critics who have decided to entertain rather than explain. In fact, since they do it well, one cannot carp too much about either Gill�s or Lane�s critical shortcomings. Unfortunately, because critics working in Irish, British, or American papers, would like their jobs, this has become the writing style, the mentality, to emulate. This has resulted in everybody becoming a comic. Or, is sadly more often the case, failing to be a comic.