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Thanks be to the generous souls on Letterboxd who run the“Not Andrew Sarris” and “Not Dave Kehr” accounts with their thoughtful capsule reviews. When logging my viewing for Metrograph’s upcoming series, On Fire Island, I found reviews for Andy Warhol and Chuck Wein’s My Hustler, Frank Perry’s Last Summer, and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances by the aforementioned critics. Stan Lopresto’s Sticks and Stones and Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand (also screening in the series) are noticeably missing professional critiques. Looking further, Last Summer is the only film of the five to receive a fair shake from a robust number of film critics and the write-ups for My Hustler and Parting Glances are more first impressions than researched arguments.

On Fire Island is programmed by Michael Lieberman, head of publicity at Metrograph, and picks up the critical slack with programming-as-criticism. The series is...