Although she’s retired now, Rita Kempley of The Washington Post was a truly terrible film reviewer. She was already writing when I started reading the paper in the 1980’s and just retired a couple of years ago. In the 1980’s she was so bad that I had to wonder why any major newspaper would shame itelf by hiring such a bad writer. She would do film reviews that consisted of making a couple of jokes about the film and pretending that was a considered opinion on the movie. By the time she had retired, she had gotten slightly better and was merely a waste of space.
I actually like Bob Mondello. I think the problem is that he has a limited range of films that he can speak on usefully. He’s also the drama critic for The Washington City Paper. He’s probably better at the sort of film that came from literature or drama.
Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post isn’t a bad reviewer, but he’s overrated. He and Roger Ebert are the only two film reviewers to win a Pulitzer Prize. Hunter writes clever stuff, but he doesn’t have very deep insights on the films. Interestingly, for the first couple of years after he came to The Post (from The Baltimore Sun), he was making interesting insights on the films, but then he started slacking off.