Andrew Sarris, Influential Film Critic, Dies at 83

By MICHAEL POWELL TBy MICHAEL POWELL The New York Times Andrew Sarris, one of the nation’s most influential film critics and a champion of auteur theory, which holds that a director’s voice is central to great filmmaking, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83. His wife, the film critic Molly Haskell, said the cause was complications of an infection developed after a fall. Courtly, incisive and acerbic in equal measure, Mr. Sarris came of critical age in the 1960s as the first great wave of foreign films washed ashore in the United States.

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June 20, 2012