Film reviewer and broadcaster with the common touch, she was feared by directors and dismissed by auteurist critics
Judith Crist, who has died aged 90, was, at one stage, probably the most widely read, listened to and watched film critic in the world. At least, due to her appearances on the early morning US television show Today and her reviews in the weekly magazine TV Guide, which had a huge circulation of 17m in its heyday, she was the American film critic with the largest appeal to a mass audience.
Crist, who called herself a "journalistic reviewer", knew what the public wanted and catered to them. She had no truck with "cerebral" film theorists, nor auteurists such as Andrew Sarris, nor feminist critics such as Molly Haskell. Her idols were James Agee, Otis Ferguson and Frank Nugent, solid writers in the literary tradition. "If you're going to be a movie fan, you take Bond as seriously as you do the grand auteurism of Bergman," she explained.
Predictably, it was her negative reviews of Hollywood films, some of which were easy targets, that made the greatest impression, particularly the scathing critique of Cleopatra (1963) that established her reputation and enlarged her readership. "At best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium," she wrote of the film. She went on to dismiss Elizabeth Taylor in the title role as "an entirely physical creature, no depth of emotion apparent in her kohl-laden eyes, no modulation in her voice, which too often rises to fishwife levels".
Hated and feared by some film-makers – Otto Preminger called her Judas Crist and Billy Wilder, after her put-down of Some Like It Hot ("full of perverse gags and homosexual in-jokes"), remarked that "getting her to review a film is like asking the Boston Strangler for a neck massage" – and dismissed as too populist by weightier film critics, Crist was nevertheless adored by many of her students at the Columbia University school of journalism, where she taught for more than 50 years. She had a reputation as a great hostess, welcoming guests to her apartment where it was "required" to smoke. (Crist claimed to have taken up smoking because of her admiration for Bette Davis.) She also held Judith Crist Film Weekends in Tarrytown, New York state, each attended by about 200 people, including actors and film-makers, from 1971 to 2006.
She was born in the Bronx, New York, as Judith Klein. Her mother was a librarian and her father a fur trader, whose business was ruined by the Depression. She attended Hunter College in Manhattan and receive a master's degree from Columbia's journalism school. Soon after graduation, she got a job writing reviews for the New York Herald Tribune, becoming the first female full-time critic on a major US newspaper. It was for the Trib that she filed the notorious Cleopatra review. In 1947 she married William Crist, a PR consultant.
When she was on the Today show, her choice of films was restricted to those distributed throughout the US, which meant she rarely reviewed foreign films. An exception was La Dolce Vita (1960), which had a wide release in the US in an English dubbed version. Crist admired Federico Fellini, whom she interviewed, at the expense of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose "obscure" L'Avventura opened around the same time at art cinemas.
She confessed to taking guilty pleasure in watching revenge movies such as Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), but disliked the work of Sam Peckinpah. Crist's opinion of The Godfather (1972) was: "You can't say the trash doesn't get first-class treatment." Of Jaws (1975), she wrote: "The film works to such horrifying effect, that you're bound to suspect that producers Richard D Zanuck and David Brown were secretly financed by the Swimming Pool Manufacturers of America." She championed Steven Spielberg from his first feature The Sugarland Express, and Woody Allen almost from the beginning of his career.
However, in Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), his sour, subjective portrayal of how the famous see their fans, Crist found herself cruelly lampooned in the character of the organiser (played by Helen Hanft) of a "film culture" weekend. Crist, who has a cameo during a flashback fantasy, felt herself badly used by the film.
Her husband died in 1993. She is survived by her son, Steven.
• Judith Crist, film critic, born 22 May 1922; died 7 August 2012