Andrew Sarris, the charmingly disputatious Village Voice and New York Observer film critic who helped make New York's film community in the '70s and '80s a cauldron of intrigue and joyous rhetorical sniping, died this morning after suffering a fall. He was, as the Times put it, an "intellectual duelist" whose frequent battles with rival Pauline Kael didn't stop him from inviting her to his wedding to Molly Haskell. Kael declined: "That's OK. I'll go to Molly's next wedding." (Haskell and Sarris remained married; she is his only survivor.)

The introduction to film critic Andrew Sarris's best-films list for 2005, published in The New York Observer on January 11, 2006: