In Maslin's case, she wrote a mixed review of a Cocteau film which played at the Carnegie Hall Cinema back in the late 70's, when she was switched from writing about pop music to movies. And she said a few nice things, which were excepted and placed in an ad. And she was so upset, from then on...
The Bosley Crowther didn't like much of anything, he was a curmudgeonly curmudgeon, or maybe that was from working at the NYTimes, where in the film reviews, the sentences are always a mix of a positive with a negative, so the ads can't excerpt a sentence. Janet Maslin was a master at this. A...