Critics get a bad press. They tend to be seen as show-offs--the withering restaurant critic in Ratatouille was called Anton Ego--and assassins. They get asked "How you can be so cruel?" Well, they reply, any opinion has to be honest and a bad review gives the good ones more force, as well as doing the punter a service. But criticism isn't really about giving a thumbs up or down, its about capturing a piece of work, and making sense of it. Reviewing is a branch of reporting.

The internet has diluted the critics' power but widened their reach. Hundreds of them are now at your fingertips. But where to begin? There is a website where you can find critics fast (metacritic.com) but it only covers America, and it's a shortcut, not a filter. So we asked leading writers and editors which critics they turn to. Intelligent Life is in a position to be impartial, as we don't run straight reviews, and we drew up a few rules: no members of their family, or ours; no employees or employers. The aim wasn't so much to pick winners, although one critic did get the most votes, as to pinpoint treats you may be missing. Criticism attracts some top-class writers: here are about 30 of them.

BOOKS

James Wood

(The New Yorker, roughly once a month)

Critics aren't there to award stars or confirm what you already think-or to show off. Their job is to inform, provoke, educate and entertain. James Wood's fiction reviews are always severe and often annoying, but he has a passion for realism--brilliantly expounded in his new book "How Fiction Works" (Cape), which is both a high-minded essay and a how-to primer. ~ BLAKE MORRISON

The thrill of Wood is that he believes in criticism in the old-fashioned sense--as an art in itself, as an activity with moral weight. He moves easily from rigorous close reading, to career arcs, to the wider cultural context, and back; he is unafraid of sacred cows. ~ AIDA EDEMARIAM

JOHN CAREY

(The Sunday Times, most weeks)

Because he has the ability to make almost anything interesting and because we share some prejudices--eg, that Virginia Woolf was wrong about Arnold Bennett and that modernism was a sneaky way of keeping art beyond the comprehension of what we shall have to call ordinary people. ~ IAN JACK

As a student, I was electrified by John Carey's lectures on Tudor England: he made history come alive as a context for literature. It's a gift that shines out of his reviews, too. He has a sharp eye for the bogus, and his frankness can seem harsh, but it is the flip side of his scrupulous honesty. ~ REBECCA WILLIS

CRAIG BROWN

(The Mail on Sunday, every week, though not online)

Brown is the funniest writer in British journalism. But he's much more than that. His weekly lead book review for the Mail on Sunday is always surprising and perceptive, making telling, serious-minded points. Oh, and it's usually very funny. ~ MICK BROWN

Brown, best known as a satirist, combines a light touch with sure-handed authority. ~ SIMON GARFIELD

JOHN LANCHESTER

(London Review of Books, several times a year)

Lanchester is a London-based novelist whose industrial-scale reading takes him into the murkiest areas of contemporary life-climate-change sceptics, subprime derivatives, Alastair Campbell. Lucid, precise and unstuffy, Lanchester emerges from his desk-bound research trips with verdicts that are satisfyingly tough and tidy. On climate change: "there is one school of thought and a few nutters". On derivatives: "the most powerful and the most complicated financial instruments ever devised". On Campbell: "a total prick". ~ ROBERT BUTLER

MICHIKO KAKUTANI

(The New York Times, about once a week)

Not because I think she's always right but because she's forthright--not afraid, not compromised by friendships with writers, publishers and literary agents. I've never seen her at any literary event. Among book reviewers (many of whom are also book writers), this makes her rare. ~ IAN JACK

NICHOLAS LEZARD

(The Guardian, every Saturday)

I've been a dedicated reader of Lezard's paperback choice ever since reading a column of his on Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes" (Granta). It was a discovery--a remarkable piece of writing that really influenced my thinking. I still recommend it to friends, and I've remained a fan of Lezard's engagingly candid style. ~ JO GLANVILLE

ADAM BEGLEY

(The New York Observer)

Imagine the New York uncle you never had--braces, bow-tie, the dish on everyone who walks into the room--and you have Adam Begley, the New York Observer's literary editor, who rolls up his sleeves every week or so to write his tipsheet on whatever masterwork is doing the rounds: DeLillo, Updike, Roth, Coetzee. He is informed without showing off, feline without being catty and he never lets his nose for good prose throw him off the hunt for great story-telling. ~ TOM SHONE

JESSA CRISPIN

(www.bookslut.com/blog/ every weekday)

Crispin left her job as a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood in Austin, Texas, to review books from a flat in Chicago. Erudite, fantastically opinionated, truly eclectic, her blog communicates an unpretentious passion for books new and old. ~ AIDA EDEMARIAM

AL ALVAREZ

(New York Review of Books, a few times a year)

Alvarez has been posting epic reviews and essays for the premier critical publication since the 1960s. He is brilliant on all forms of risk, be it poker or alcoholism, and reserves special approval for the suicidal poets and depressive novelists who dare to send back dispatches from the edge of oblivion. The prose has forensic heft, but also an unostentatious levity. ~ JASPER REES

RON ROSENBAUM

(Slate.com about twice a month; pajamasmedia.com/xpress/ronrosenbaum/ about twice a week)

An American journalist-author who is underrated compared with, say, Malcolm Gladwell, Rosenbaum writes brilliantly original books ("The Shakespeare Wars", 2006; "Explaining Hitler", 1998; both Random House). He's a wonderful writer, very eclectic, who should be better known. ~ ROD WILLIAMS

DANCE

ALASTAIR MACAULAY

(The New York Times, several times a week)

Macaulay gave up reviewing theatre for the FT a year ago to become dance critic of the New York Times. A new Renaissance Man and pedagogue (who used to tutor the choreographer Matthew Bourne), he can be as eloquent about an actor's or singer's vocal production as about the technical nuances and historical intricacies of ballet. ~ JULIE KAVANAGH

ART

PETER SCHJELDAHL

(The New Yorker, about twice a month)

Schjeldahl's column manages to balance delectable descriptions, analytical precision and unexpected feeling, from Lucian Freud's "dirty-meringue" textures to a Martin Puryear sculpture that is "consolingly familiar". Fittingly, Schjeldahl is also a poet. ~ EMILY BOBROW

T.J. CLARK

(book writer)

He was once a member of King Mob--the anarchist group that attacked art galleries in the 1960s--but nobody looks at a painting like the historian T.J. Clark. He spent a whole year studying two Poussin landscapes, and wrote it up in a book, "The Sight of Death" (Yale, 2006). Never mind art reviews, that book shows how to do it yourself. ~ MATTHEW SWEET

CLASSICAL MUSIC

ALEX ROSS

(The New Yorker, periodically; http://www.therestisnoise.com/, daily)

Alex Ross writes about classical music with passion, certainty and unpretentious belief, whether in the New Yorker or on his blog, which has the same name as his new book (Fourth Estate). He never resorts to--in fact, he actively combats--what he calls the "empty formulas of intellectual superiority" that litter most classical-music writing. For Ross (and, I suspect, for most contemporary composers too), classical music does not exist on a mountaintop above every other form of music, but comes from the same culture as rock, punk and hip-hop. ~ JON FASMAN

NORMAN LEBRECHT

(Evening Standard, every Wednesday)

Lebrecht has his detractors, but his lucid, forceful and funny appraisals of artists, recordings and concerts are always a pleasure to read. ~ SARAH DALLAS

FILM

ANTHONY LANE

(The New Yorker, every other Monday)

Lane, who is English, vaulted to the New Yorker from the Independent on Sunday in 1993: the critic as unimpeachable stylist. His sentences are lovely, delivering their goods with an uncrotchety humour that seems to fall in with the pace of your own best thinking and feeling. He's a very flattering writer. ~ NICK COLEMAN

Before seeing a movie I always check the New Yorker site to find out if Anthony Lane has reviewed it. A young Brit with a donnish intellect, the wit of Clive James and a voice entirely his own, he has a big following in America, but is known only to devotees back home. I often return to his collection "Nobody's Perfect" (Picador, 2002) for a rush of inspiration. ~ JULIE KAVANAGH

He is so entertaining and informed that I read him religiously, even though I hardly go to the cinema. ~ TOM STANDAGE

It used to be Adam Mars-Jones, but today it is Anthony Lane whose film reviews put into words what I wish I'd said myself but never could. He asks the questions the directors should have asked themselves, in a deft, clean process that is both funny and incredibly clever.
~ REBECCA WILLIS

The Rolls-Royce of film critics. Never mind the film, you read Lane for the sheer quality of the prose. ~ MICK BROWN

The least gushing, most incisive and funniest film critic. ~ SIMON GARFIELD

DAVID EDELSTEIN

(New York magazine, every Monday)

David Edelstein's reviews have the winning gruffness of someone thinking aloud. He's not trying to persuade you of anything, merely filing a report from the front row, with all the blunt candour of someone riding out his own unruly reactions. He levels with you, he doesn't try to impress, and says more things you want to steal than any other critic. I treasure his observation about how dangerous it is for a character in a biopic to develop a cough. ~ TOM SHONE

David Edelstein's artfully plain-spoken reviews--also found at Slate.com, where he was until 2005--bristle with a love of film and unfold with casual confidence. He will boldly praise goofy blockbusters and convincingly topple false idols (on "Atonement": "It doesn't fuck with your head"). Back when I was an intern, I sent him a piece of fan-mail, sand-bagged with reviews of my own. He responded immediately and reassured me that he, too, began his career spending "48 hours writing a 400-word review". "My advice is simple", he wrote: "Write." ~ EMILY BOBROW

PHILIP FRENCH

(The Observer, every Sunday)

Good critics provide an historical context without losing their enthusiasm for innovation. I've always enjoyed Philip French's reviews for that reason: if there's a parallel between the new Tarantino and a little-known Italian thriller of the 1930s, French can be relied on to spot it and to explain what it means. ~ BLAKE MORRISON

RYAN GILBEY

(The New Statesman, every Thursday)

For his exact dissections of why a film matters, and his uninsistent familiarity with cinema's backwaters. More than capable of turning an entertaining phrase, but never at the expense of the film, only in its service. Also quite brilliant at reporting without spoiling the ending. ~ ISABEL LLOYD

ANTHONY QUINN

(The Independent, every Friday)

The stand-out stylist among Fleet Street film critics, Quinn has an impeccable nose for quality in an art form which, more than any other, requires reviewers to sift through chaff. ok, so he's seldom wild about low-budget British fare, gross-out comedy or punishing releases from Kazakhstan, but you can put your faith in his lapidary judgments on the great American film-makers. ~ JASPER REES

TELEVISION

NANCY BANKS-SMITH

(The Guardian)

Along with Katharine Whitehorn and Sue Arnold, Nancy Banks-Smith made me think that being a journalist might be the thing. She has that knack of saying what everyone feels they would have said, if only they could have. She's funny and pithy, but merciful too: she treats what the critic Peter Black called "the mirror in the corner" as an exasperating, but lovable, child. ~ ISABEL LLOYD

THEATRE

MICHAEL BILLINGTON

(The Guardian, most weekdays)

Though Billington has been around the block, his undimmed belief in drama as a force for social change translates into freshly worded dispatches about everything from Pinter to farce. While others are better on bad theatre, no one is better at explaining why good theatre works. Only word of warning: don't treat him as gospel on musicals. ~ JASPER REES

After 37 years, Billington retains an amazing enthusiasm. Massively authoritative, the shrewdest of judges, the master of the overnight review, he has a rare generosity of spirit. As was once said of William Shawn, he has moral perfect pitch. ~ SIMON O'HAGAN

MARK LAWSON

("Front Row", bbc Radio 4, about twice a week)

Not an obvious choice, as he's a broadcaster and polymath television columnist. But print theatre critics in Britain are either jaded and past their best, or over-enthusiastic and not yet near it. Lawson shows an open-minded curiosity and a novelist's grasp of story-telling. He's never snobbish, always interested, and doesn't assume that his reaction is the only one worth having. ~ ISABEL LLOYD

ROBERT CUSHMAN

(National Post, two or three times a week)

Readers who remember Cushman's brilliant reviews for the Observer (he followed Kenneth Tynan-a very tough act) may have wondered what happened to him. He visited Canada, fell in love, and stayed. In 1998 he was hired (by me) for the new National Post. "I believe you are far and away better than any theatre critic now working in Canada," I told him, and he replied, "Unfortunately, you're correct." He has been proving it ever since, with wit, learning and a distinctive voice: meticulous, free from cliché, mostly positive, devastatingly dry when negative. ~ TIM ROSTRON

DANIEL MENDELSOHN

(New York Review of Books, several times a year)

A classical scholar and author of the award-winning family memoir "The Lost", Daniel Mendelsohn combines exact descriptions of the surface vivacity of a production (to borrow from Tennessee Williams) with driving analytical argument. He's particularly strong on how modern sensibilities struggle with the innate demands of tragedy, epic and satire. One 4,000-word essay begins with his own experience in New York on 9/11, then compares Aeschylus's "The Persians" (centring on the reaction of the enemy) with the more insular approach of 9/11 movies by Paul Greengrass and Oliver Stone. No contest. ~ ROBERT BUTLER

POP CULTURE

THE AV CLUB

(www.avclub.com, every day)

For the pop?culture obsessive, chancing upon the av Club--a supplement of the inspired American spoof newspaper the Onion--feels like coming home. This dangerously addictive website is updated at least once a day, and posts reviews which are often sharper and more entertaining than the films, records, books and comics themselves. The whole site has consistently high standards, but two names to keep an eye out for are Keith Phipps, the av Club's editor and most incisive film critic, and Nathan Rabin, the frighteningly prolific and hilariously scathing head writer.
~ NICHOLAS BARBER

ROCK MUSIC

SASHA FRERE-JONES

(The New Yorker, about twice a month)

When Sasha Frere-Jones first landed in the New Yorker, nobody even knew what sex he or she was. The writing was so good on just about everything from rap to country that many suspected a dastardly plan, concocted by those clever folks at the New Yorker, to bedevil the strait-jacketed niche-marketing of the American record companies. Then you re-read the reviews and you know the truth: the man listens to music in his sleep. ~ TOM SHONE

Pop music is such a generational thing, it's rare to find a critic who can address a wide audience with authority. Frere-Jones not only knows his stuff, but writes with great insight and elegance--and you can't tell how old he is. ~ MICK BROWN

ROBERT FORSTER

(The Monthly, first Wednesday of the month)

Forster is a rock critic with a major difference: he is a successful singer--mainly with the Go-Betweens--who writes on the side. He does it so well that he beat all Australia's full-time critics to the 2006 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing. He specialises in gleeful endorsements and velvet slayings. Making good music isn't easy, so he explains, and seldom cringes, when it goes bad. He's awake to producers, mixers, marketers, songwriters-for-hire; to "not too disconcerting lyrics about the boy-girl situation". In three years as a critic, he's hardly written a dead sentence yet. ~ CHRISTIAN RYAN

LAURA BARTON

(The Guardian, alternate Fridays)

There are many solid pop critics, but strangely few who make sentences sing. In Britain, the rock writer with the best voice is Laura Barton, whose freewheeling fortnightly column is music to your eyes: soulful, rhythmic, fearlessly open, and fully engaged with life, not boxed off from it. ~ TIM DE LISLE

RICHARD WILLIAMS

(The Guardian, about once a month)

For pleasure, I read Laura Barton (above); for edification, her colleague Richard Williams, whose reviews are sporadic as he is now the Guardian's chief sportswriter. A former rock critic of the Times and editor of Time Out, Williams has been an authoritative guide to good records since at least 1971, when he discovered Roxy Music. ~ TIM DE LISLE

GREIL MARCUS

(Interview, monthly)

Marcus's "Mystery Train" (Dutton, 1975) is the best book ever written on the subject of rock's complicated relationship with folk history. His eccentric, multi-directional column in Interview is called "Elephant Dancing: the who, what, the wow and the why". It runs the rule over all the peculiar things which have captured him lately. There are no star ratings. Merely cool stuff is of no interest. What Marcus likes is the big picture and the details which fill it right to the edge. ~ NICK COLEMAN

MARCUS BERKMANN

(The Spectator, once a month)

Berkmann's column, which has run for more than 20 years, is only monthly but the wait is invariably worth it. He has tremendous comic timing, is quite unswayed by fashion, and seems to operate completely outside the industry, buying his own music and enthusing about it--or rubbishing it--just like any normal consumer. ~ SIMON O'HAGAN

CONTRIBUTORS

NICHOLAS BARBER is a film critic on the Independent on Sunday.

EMILY BOBROW edits our website, moreintelligentlife.com.

MICK BROWN is a feature writer on the Telegraph magazine and a former rock critic.

ROBERT BUTLER is an ex-theatre critic of the Independent on Sunday.

NICK COLEMAN is a former arts editor of the Independent.

SARAH DALLAS edits The Economist Cities Guide.

TIM DE LISLE is deputy editor of Intelligent Life and rock critic of the Mail on Sunday.

AIDA EDEMARIAM is a feature writer on the Guardian.

JON FASMAN is a novelist and editor on Economist.com.

SIMON GARFIELD is a feature writer on the Observer and radio critic of the Mail on Sunday. His new book is "The Error World: An Affair with Stamps" (Faber, April).

JO GLANVILLE is editor of Index on Censorship.

IAN JACK is a Guardian columnist and former editor of Granta and the Independent on Sunday.

JULIE KAVANAGH is a former London editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Her latest book is "Rudolf Nureyev: The Life" (Fig Tree).

ISABEL LLOYD is commissioning editor of Intelligent Life.

BLAKE MORRISON, author of "And When Did You Last See Your Father?", is an ex-literary editor of the Independent on Sunday.

SIMON O'HAGAN is deputy comment editor of the Independent and ex-arts editor of the Independent on Sunday.

JASPER REES is an arts interviewer for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

CHRISTIAN RYAN is a former editor of the Monthly, where he launched Robert Forster's column.

TIM ROSTRON is a publisher, ex-arts editor of the National Post and ex-rock writer on the Daily Telegraph.

TOM SHONE is a former film critic of the Sunday Times and author of "Blockbuster" (Simon & Schuster).

TOM STANDAGE edits The Economist's Technology Quarterly.

MATTHEW SWEET presents "Night Waves" on BBC Radio 3.

ROD WILLIAMS is a film-maker who wrote about Joyce Hatto in our autumn issue.

REBECCA WILLIS is associate editor of Intelligent Life.

Illustrations by Mick Marston