Film critics often have a not-so-secret desire to get behind the camera themselves. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Bogdanovich are among those who made the leap successfully, though Bogdanovich returned to writing after his directing career faltered in the mid-'70s. Even thumbs-up critic Roger Ebert once ventured a screenplay, for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Wrote friend Mike Royko after a screening: "Every young man is entitled to one big mistake."

Donald Richie has worn the label of "foremost foreign authority on Japanese cinema" for decades. Arriving in Japan in 1947 as a 23-year-old soldier with the Occupation forces, Richie has lived here, with breaks for work and study, ever since.

A film buff since childhood, he witnessed Japanese cinema's Golden Age -- and its subsequent decline -- first-hand, while getting to know many of its leading figures. He wrote pioneering studies on Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, as well as a history of Japanese cinema with Joseph Anderson that, since its publication in 1959, has come to be regarded as a standard text. Today he teaches a course on Ozu at the Tokyo campus of Temple University and reviews Japanese films for the International Herald Tribune. He has also been, at various stages of his career, a poet, short-story writer, novelist, composer and -- no surprise -- filmmaker.