Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.
The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics.
The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.