Rollins Maxwell · Public domain

For more than two decades at The New Yorker she wrote film criticism unlike anyone else's, personal and opinionated rather than bound to any fixed theory of what a movie should be, and used that voice to introduce American readers to Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa and Truffaut while championing the New Hollywood directors of the 1970s: Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma. Roger Ebert credited her with a more positive influence on American film culture than any other single critic of her era.