Everyone is a critic. No, seriously--(L-R) Armond White, Thelma Adams, Stephen Holden and Glenn Kenny bring their keen eyes to the Upper West Side (Photo: STV)

I should not have to write too much to convey the general experience of yesterday's "The Votes Are In" film critics panel at Makor. It seemed like kind of a can't-miss proposition to turn four high-profile critics loose on each other at the end of a crappy year for movies, especially when you can fly planes between their publications' general interests. Yet The Times's Stephen Holden, Us Weekly's Thelma Adams, Premiere's Glenn Kenny and NY Press's Armond White not only survived, but also flourished in many respects, leaving the 150 or so spectators wondering what kind of rules had to be set down beforehand to assure Adams that White would not eat her in one gulp, chair and all.

Of course, they are friends, which I guess is great for them but did nothing at all for me. On the other hand, I felt relieved to have seen most of the films the quartet discussed; the group invested a lot of time climbing Brokeback Mountain in particular, which was only released Friday and had not made the top-weekend-things-to-do list of most of those in attendance. The film endured a battery of comparisons to Gregg Araki's outlandishly awful Mysterious Skin (another picture that had not found much of an audience among Makor's Jewish mother constituency), and provoked one of the afternoon's more interesting dialogues about 2005's surge of gay-themed films.

"Well, these other films didn't have the benefit of a multimillion dollar promotional campaign from Universal and General Electric," White argued, referring to the parental hierarchy of Brokeback's distributor Focus Features. "There are good films that go for want of praise and want of attendance simply because they're not promoted well enough. When it comes to something like Brokeback Mountain, where I see the media I guess congratulating (themselves) for being tolerant--'Rah rah for gay marriage'--I think of all the better films about gay issues that opened this year that no critics paid attention to."

White had in mind films like Cote D'Azur and Garçon Stupide, which he argued dealt with gay issues more honestly than Brokeback (and Mysterious Skin, for that matter). The chat got better from there, with White literally laughing off Holden's claim that Brokeback was as good as The Last Picture Show. I cannot say I felt sorry for Holden; I was laughing on the inside, natch, but more at his stunned reaction than at his outrageous statement.

And really, if you were dropping by for a steel-cage match, you had to know White would be your go-to guy. For whatever reason, the brittle, contrarian bitchiness that stifles his columns resurfaced Sunday as optimism--and you cannot say that it was there in the Press the whole time. Remember, this is the guy who only three weeks ago eviscerated these same colleagues for their smugness and intellectual dishonesty.

Not that he invoked a cuddle party Sunday, but the guy had some far more constructive insights to pass along when he could--like when Holden asked if he rejected cynical films like Syriana in an ostensibly cynical time. "You have an agenda which is really that movies should progress, (or) morally uplift us," Holden said.

"Everybody has an agenda," White said. "So I'm not ashamed to say my agenda is that I want a movie that does not insult me, and very simply, basically, I want what everybody wants from art: I want art to show me something about myself, something about others--tell me something about the world that I wouldn't have understood until I encountered this work of art."

"But something positive," Holden said.

"No," White said. "No. Not necessarily positive. I believe in that Leslie Fiedler line, 'No! in Thunder': Not necessarily positive in a namby-pamby sense, but positive in a profound sense. If we're living in a cynical age, why do we need more cynical movies? We can get cynicism really easily-- just pick it out of the air. Living in a cynical age we need movies that teach us how to remember that we're human. To remember that we're like others."

Panel moderator Michael Zam jumped in. "So what are some movies that make you feel that this year?"

"Munich," White replied. "The great, great Munich."

"Oh my God," Adams groaned.

That is pretty much where the discussion broke off into an insider bull session about unreleased films that most of the audience obviously had not yet seen. Munich got a lot of face time, as did The New World, King Kong, Match Point (notably--and wrongly, I might add--reviled by each of the panelists; more on that here Dec. 21) and The Producers. A few other fall films did make it into the chat: Lodge Kerrigan's brilliant Keane came up and was promptly forgotten again, while A History of Violence drew mixed sentiments including Kenny's awe-inspiring (and unironic!) observation: "I don't think Cronenberg thinks of himself as a satirist. I think of it as more of a philosophical burlesque."

Meanwhile, Adams wondered if Jake Gyllenhaal would be considered as more than Brokeback Mountain's supporting actor Oscar hopeful had he not played a bottom, and White defended Steven Spielberg's two-sport stardom in 2005 (with War of the Worlds complementing Munich): "The problem isn't that Spielberg isn't as smart as he thinks he is. It's that people think Spielberg isn't as smart as they are."

And timing of timings! The New York Film Critics Circle is having its vote as we speak, so stay tuned to get an idea of the judgment lapse at which White will aim his next salvo. I have a feeling that History of Violence is the gang's front-runner, but really--nobody tells me anything new around here.