Cyrus: Film critics go all William Wellman on its ass?

Interesting note by Richard Brody at his unmissable film blog at the New Yorker website:

.....cinephiles who are devoted to the great works of classic Hollywood, and who have an ongoing auteurist fascination with the films of today’s Hollywood, have developed a fealty to Hollywood’s styles—its gloss, precision, and dramatic concentration—that is hardly weaker than that of mass audiences. (The celebration of foreign films, even those that differ radically from American commercial productions, is a different story altogether, precisely because of their cultural otherness—and that seat-of-the-pants exoticism also explains the acclaim of many bad foreign films.) As a result, some of the most original and personal independent filmmakers find themselves pilloried by critics—even their contemporaries, who, in a kind of neo-classical rage, complain the way that some art critics used to complain about Jackson Pollock. The simplicity, vulnerability, directness, and immediacy of such films as “Cyrus”—an imperfect work, as I wrote yesterday, but one with unusual and exhilarating virtues as well—comes off to them like an absence of craft.