In his parting reflection as Arts Editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Michael Shmith issued a piquant lament: “There is still no established career path for critics. Where is the next generation?”

Part of me can sympathise with Shmith's cri de coeur. In all my years of freelance writing and talking about cinema in public, I have never stumbled across anything that looks remotely like a career path. But that does not mean there are no new critics lurking on the scene. The real problem is in knowing where and how to find them.

Film critics do not always arrive with the legitimacy of university degrees. Those who have managed to become professionals in the field often get dismayed over the prevailing attitude that anyone can be a movie reviewer. Yet there is some justice in this; many of the critics I most admire are passionate amateurs, proud autodidacts.

Another complicating factor is that film critics are not necessarily people who write a large number of reviews – or even write at all. Some critics do their best and most influential work by inspiring their friends and students in conversation; others by running a repertory cinema or programming a film society. Jean-Luc Godard has often said that he never stopped being a critic – he simply moved his critical speculations off the page and onto the screen.

Perhaps the major reason why critics can be hard to locate these days is that they do not necessarily all attend the same movies.