Here's Schickel on the crucial difference between an essay and a review ...
[R]eviews are not essays, those lengthy and leisurely reflections on careers or themes aimed at an audience that has some knowledge of the subject at hand. Reviews, however gracefully written, whatever grander fantasies their authors may entertain, are a form of consumer guidance, written in haste, against deadlines and to space. Worse, the reviewer is always the prisoner of what's on offer at the moment in his field. I would say, based on bitter experience, that well over half the time, he's obliged to conjure up an opinion about stuff on which he would not normally care to spare an idle thought, let alone a thousand or more words.
And here is Simon on why good entertainment matters -- and why it matters that critics cover it ...
Our great problem is that we do not sufficiently understand and appreciate the shortness of our time, that we do not (and apparently will not) comprehend how much great art of all kinds there is in the world in which our time is so short that we can explore only a fraction of its wonders. Hence it is stupid and vicious to entice people into wasting hours of their brief span on … drivel.
