I say this all the time: In matters of personal taste, there is no right or wrong. But I’m usually saying it to people who’ve sent me hate mail and insisted I was an idiot.

Like most critics, I enjoyed “The Dark Knight,” which ought to put a temporary hold on the accusations that we’re all elitists. While the movie was setting a new record for opening-weekend box-office receipts, its score on the critical-consesnsus site Rotten Tomatoes was 94 percent “fresh,” and its average score on the more picky Metacritic was 82.

But one smart critic who dissented, David Edelstein  of New York Magazine and NPR, got so much flak for calling the film bleak and cruel that he had to revisit the issue in a follow-up column titled “The Dark Knight of My Soul.”

Some of his criticism of “The Dark Knight” is that “the plotting is herky-jerky, the psychology perplexing, the action scenes incoherent, and Two-Face’s coin flips a pale echo of Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men.”

Many of the angry readers who wrote to Edelstein assumed he was an elitist who didn’t like popcorn movies, particularly violent ones. Yet unlike me, he loved “Wanted.” And when he was in St. Louis a couple years ago for our film festival, he mingled with the commoners.

Although I liked “The Dark Knight,” I respect contrarians, and I recommend the article for the insight it offers into criticism in the digital age, which is increasingly driven by a mob mentality.