The end of the affair: squeezed for profits, newspapers send their staff film critics packing. Is this sound cost-cutting or a missed opportunity?

"My grandma's in town, is there anything I can take her to see?"

"You have already ruined this movie for me!"

"I won't see any film unless you recommend it."

"I disagree with you about every movie. I know if you like it, I won't."

Like the newspaper readers quoted above, almost everyone who has an opinion about movies also has an opinion about movie critics. We're grateful they convinced us to give "Knocked Up" a chance (or not). We share their love of (or disdain for) the "Spiderman" franchise. We agree (or take issue) with every word they've ever written about Quentin Tarantino or Angelina Jolie.

We care about what they write. But do we care where they write? When we crave a movie fix, does it matter whether the film review we read comes from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or down the street?

A growing number of newspapers are betting that we don't care. Under pressure to increase profits, trim expenses and sharpen their focus on local topics to compete better online, they are jettisoning or shrinking their homegrown movie criticism.

This year in Tampa, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale and Denver, papers have bought out, laid off or reassigned their movie critics. Last fall at the Dallas Morning News, one of two full-time film critics took a buyout and wasn't replaced. The cuts often were part of an overall reduction in newsroom staff, arts coverage, or both.

Do newspapers need local movie criticism, or is eliminating it simply a smart cost-saving move that frees up resources for more important local fare?

This question is entangled with some of the most fundamental quandaries that newspapers face during this time of massive upheaval: How can we best position our dwindling resources to offer something unique in a crowded marketplace? How much interaction with us--and with one another--should our readers expect? Are there places where we should cede territory, and, if so, in what areas should we fight to stay competitive?

Most newspapers that decide to cut homegrown criticism do so as they reshuffle their staffs to concentrate ever more closely on local beats. To this end, they eliminate reporting that readers can get, or are already getting, from other sources online.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as at many papers, this reorganization touches everything from arts and book reviews to national and international news. The paper doesn't plan to dispatch a reporter to cover the 2008 presidential elections. It sent two journalists to Iraq this year, but not to report on the war in general. Instead, they documented the experiences of Atlanta's armed service members deployed there.

"We've made a strategic decision that our future rests in providing readers unique local stories" and other local content, Bert Roughton, the AJC's managing editor for print, wrote in an e-mail interview. "To be consistent with this strategy, we've decided not to use our staff to produce reviews that we can get from other sources."

The paper's longtime movie critic, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, was one of 44 newsroom staffers who accepted buyouts this summer. From now on, reporter Bob Longino will write a movie Q & A column and lead an online forum and blog as "Alan Smithee," which, Roughton says, "is the name that Hollywood would place on a screenplay of uncertain provenance." He'll also cover local film events.

He may "write reviews about movies coming to Atlanta, but generally only when we don't have another source for the review," Roughton wrote. "We will use our staff to write only those stories that have some clear connection to metro Atlanta and perhaps Georgia."

Similar pressures and strategies have led to the elimination of staff critic positions at other papers. To cut expenses, Denver's Rocky Mountain News bought out 17 newsroom employees, including Robert Denerstein, its film critic for 27 years. (He may continue with the paper as a freelancer.)

In April, the Tampa Tribune laid off eight newsroom employees, including movie critic Bob Ross, and began using wire reviews. "The reality is that we're going to have smaller staffs, so you have to look at what your franchise is as a local newspaper," says Executive Editor Janet Coats. "We're doing the best we can to focus our resources on creating the content that people expect to get from us and not from another source. Increasingly, that means trying to keep as many of your reporters as possible focused on local newsgathering," on beats like sports, local government and schools.

In June, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reassigned movie critic Phoebe Flowers to a general entertainment and pop culture beat, with a focus on local arts, according to Editor Earl Maucker. The paper's film reviews now come from other Tribune Co. papers.

"Local news is the absolute priority," Maucker says. "We have a limited number of resources. On any given day, a lot of things go uncovered because we don't have the resources to be where we'd like to be. We decided those resources would be better deployed on local stories."

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, considers this a sound strategy. Reporting on local theater and music "is a tighter match toward covering the local community" than writing movie reviews, he says.

Stephen Gray, managing director for the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project, which explores how newspapers should position themselves for the future, asks, "Should you cut a sports reporter covering local sports or cut a movie critic? You want to focus on local coverage, where you're doing a local story on a local institution or phenomenon."

Rather than compete with the many reviews available online, he says, "To cut where a zillion other sources are available makes sense."

If a paper's aim is to offer distinct content, others say, keeping the film critic is the right way to do it. "Hyperlocal is not just about covering your very narrow geographic area. It is about giving you something that you can't get anywhere else," says Douglas McLennan, founding editor of ArtsJournal.com, a Seattle-based digest of arts journalism. "I would argue that if your local paper is just going to reprint the [Universal Press Syndicate's] Roger Ebert review, people can get that in a thousand different places. It's not going to build your audience or readership, or in any way make them loyal to whatever brand it is you're trying to produce."

In an effort to differentiate their film coverage, some papers, like the Dallas Morning News, are focusing less on reviews and more on film-related features and local news.

Before undertaking "a strategic reduction in staff so that we really became more of a local and regional paper" last fall, says the paper's editor, Robert W. Mong Jr., managers took a "survey of our most serious readers of arts and entertainment coverage. What they clearly want from us is context, a more thematic approach to our more ambitious work."

As part of the reduction, the entertainment section, Guidelive, started running more wire reviews and slimmed down on three weekdays. The paper bought out 111 of about 560 newsroom employees, including Philip Wuntch, who had been a film critic there since 1974. This left one full-time staff movie critic, down from three before a round of layoffs the previous year. (See "The Dallas Mourning News," April/May 2005.)

The remaining critic, Chris Vognar, writes fewer "commodity-type reviews," Mong says. Instead, he writes features about the film industry and the local movie scene.

With three major film festivals and a vibrant art-house culture in Dallas, there is plenty for Vognar to cover locally. That's increasingly true in communities around the country. There will be more than 170 film festivals in the United States this year, in locales from Park City, Utah (Sundance), to Concord, New Hampshire (the Somewhat North of Boston, or SNOB, Film Festival), according to the Internet Movie Database. Many local and state governments fund robust incentive programs to lure production companies. And with advances in digital video, local filmmakers are becoming ubiquitous.

For many critics, such activity brings an intense local focus to the beat. "Critics need to be in touch with local exhibitors, academics and regional producers," says David Edelstein, chief film critic at New York magazine and film reviewer for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." "You can't just cover the new George Clooney movie."

But the Clooney beat is local for Rich Copley, who covers film as part of his job as culture writer at the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Kentucky, Clooney's birthplace. In fact, although Lexington may not spring to mind when most people think of movie capitals, the city is a good example of the reach that film can have in Middle America: Copley also closely tracks Johnny Depp and Ashley Judd, two stars with Kentucky roots, as well as former state gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lunsford, whose production company helped finance Sundance Audience Award-winner "Grace is Gone." For several years, Copley has followed the work of Jason Epperson, who appeared on the Fox reality show and filmmaking competition "On the Lot" this summer. "You have to keep an eye out for local talent," Copley says.

"And when a film like 'Seabiscuit,' which is about thoroughbred racing and where they spent a month here filming, comes along, there is tremendous interest here," he notes.