A good movie critic is supposed to be knowledgeable about films past and present, share that knowledge in an engaging way, and offer opinions forcefully and honestly.

I hope I've done that in my tenure as The Salt Lake Tribune 's movie critic.

Right now, there's a guy who wants me fired for it.

"Get us a critic in tune with the movies the general public want to see, or cancel my subscription," reads an e-mail sent by one angry reader over the weekend.

The complaint was specifically against my four-star review (printed in Friday's Tribune; online at http://www.film-finder.com) of "Amarcord," Federico Fellini's 1973 nostalgia piece about life in the seaside Italian town in which the director spent his formative years.

"Amarcord" won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1975, and is an acknowledged classic. I had never seen it before last week, and I found in it an imaginative account of Fellini's memories of his eccentric neighbors. I also saw indications of what influenced the carnival-like imagery of his great films, such as "8 1/2" (a movie we'll be hearing a lot about in December, when the musical remake of it, "Nine," floods screens and the Oscar race).

Here's my angry reader's appraisal of my review: "Another 4-star rating for more foreign subtitled garbage for movie entertainment. ... How many of your readers are going to run see that crap at the Tower Theatre after Sean's stunning praise? Get with the times and give us what we want!"

Two weeks earlier, this same angry reader complained because I gave four stars to "Pirate Radio," the bawdy British comedy by "Notting Hill" director Richard Curtis, while doling out two stars to Roland Emmerich's disaster movie "2012."

"As usual you favor the foreign crap and hate the entertainment the average Joe wants to see," the angry reader wrote.

Let's dismiss the xenophobia inherent in labeling an English-language movie with American stars (Philip Seymour Hoffman, January Jones), recognizable British actors (including two from "Pirates of the Caribbean") and a '60s-rock soundtrack as "foreign crap." (There are more subtitled scenes in "2012" than in "Pirate Radio.") Let's go straight to the dead-wrong assertion that I, and most critics, hate popular movies.

Of the five highest-grossing movies of this summer -- "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," "Up," "The Hangover" and "Star Trek" -- the majority of critics nationwide liked four of them.

"Harry Potter" got a 83 percent favorable response on the critics' clearinghouse RottenTomatoes.com; "Up" got 98 percent; "The Hangover," 78 percent; and "Star Trek," 95 percent. ("Transformers 2" scored only 19 percent on the Tomato-meter -- the movie-criticism equivalent of that fifth dentist who doesn't recommend sugarless gum.)

This angry reader isn't the first to complain about a critic's reviews, or to break out the familiar complaint that "critics don't like what the people like." In fact, the argument goes back decades.

The legendary film critic Manny Farber, who started writing reviews in 1942 and retired in the mid-'70s to focus on being a painter, tackled this issue in a Feb. 28, 1944, essay in The New Republic . (It's reprinted in the brick-thick anthology, Farber on Film , a required-reading volume that was published in October, more than a year after Farber's death.)

When people say "I only go to the movies to be entertained," Farber wrote, they imply "that the rest of us, who are serious about the films, go to them as we would to castor oil."

Seeking only entertainment, Farber goes on, "supposes that a person can consciously leave all of his experience of life and his desire for new experiences behind him when he goes to the movies, and can present to the movie a kind of third-rate part of himself that is interested only in being diverted by what he believes are third-rate representations of life. Short of blind self-deception or a peculiarly affected attitude toward esthetics, I don't see how this can be done."

(Farber was no snooty ivory-tower critic. He would demolish the stodgy, self-important movies the studios made as Oscar bait, while praising comedies and thrillers that he believed went beyond their genre limitations.)

I think a viewer who is fully engaged -- willing to be moved, willing to be provoked into thinking and feeling -- will be entertained beyond measure by a good movie. He or she also will be enlightened, informed and transported. It's why I keep going to the movies, to find the nuggets in the dirt.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture.