The Times’ New Movie Critic

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the appointment of two new film critics: Elvis Mitchell and A.O. Scott, a regular Slate contributor, will join the staff in January as longtime critic Janet Maslin departs. The newspaper reported that, “a recent article in Slate on Martin Scorsese drew [Scott] to the attention of the Times.”–referring to Scott’s “Assessment” of the filmmaker, which ran in October upon the release of Bringing Out the Dead. “If Scorsese can make movies as well as they can be made,” Scott wrote, “why does one so often feel that his movies–especially over the last decade or so–could have been made better?”