As a lifelong film buff who became a professional film critic in my late twenties, I’ve spent much of my life ever since trying to reconcile these two distinct and, in some respects, conflicting identities. Many of my colleagues seem to regard criticism and fandom as reverse sides of the same commercial coin—compatible and mutually reinforcing facets of the same impulses, sometimes blissfully fusing into a sincere form of advertising.

By José Teodoro The murder of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains one of the cinema’s most traumatic turning points in part because it so completely refutes causality. Only the most obtuse (or misogynist) of moral misers could regard the shower murder as any kind of karmic consequence of Marion’s theft from her…