NEW YORK (AP) - Judith Crist, a blunt and popular film critic for the "Today" show, TV Guide and the New York Herald Tribune whose reviews were at times so harsh that director Otto Preminger labeled her "Judas Crist," has died. She was 90.
Her son, Steven Crist, said his mother died Tuesday at her Manhattan home after a long illness.
Starting in 1963, at the Tribune, Crist wrote about and discussed thousands of movies, and also covered theater and books. She was among the first reviewers of her time to gain a national following, and Roger Ebert credited her with helping to make all film critics better known, including such contemporaries as The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice.
With the growing recognition of such foreign directors as Francois Truffaut and Federico Fellini, and the rise of such American filmmakers as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, the 1960s and 1970s were an inspiring time for movie reviewers. But Crist's trademark quickly became the putdown.
Crist was occasionally banned from advance screenings, while studios and theaters would threaten to pull advertising. When her "Cleopatra" review brought her a prize from the New York Newspaper Women's Club, officials at 20th Century Fox, which released the movie, withdrew from the ceremony.
After she condemned Billy Wilder's cross-dressing classic "Some Like It Hot" for its "perverse" gags and "homosexual "in' joke(s)," Wilder allegedly remarked that asking her to review your movie was like "asking the Boston strangler to massage your neck."