We need to talk about the critic reviews for The Acolyte. Critics and audiences have been at war for years.

Audiences usually accuse critics of being either out of touch or biased because they tend to downplay the quality of popular movies and shows. On the other hand, critics have a reputation for assigning ridiculously high scores to content audiences could not care less about.

I usually defend the critics even though I rarely agree with their opinions because audiences have a ridiculously warped perception where this topic is concerned. First of all, audience and critic scores are not quite as divergent as online conversations suggest.

Check Rotten Tomatoes. You might be surprised to learn that most shows and films have similar audience and critic ratings. Generally speaking, audiences and critics like the same things. Those significant differences people obsess over only emerge in rare instances.

Unfortunately, those are the cases audiences highlight because they concern highly publicized films and shows. But even if those differences were more common than the evidence suggests, you can’t accuse critics of being ‘out of touch with the public’ because they are not paid to be ‘in touch’ with anyone.

Are some critics biased? Definitely, but they are the minority. That said, the divide between critic and audience scores for The Acolyte is astounding. Right now, the show has a critic rating of 85 percent and an audience score of 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Naturally, some people blame the abysmal audience score on review bombing.

That term refers to a situation where large groups of people assign a negative score to a movie or show without watching it because they want to make a point. You can’t dismiss the review bombing allegations because a rabid section of the Star Wars fanbase continues to express its desire to destroy The Acolyte’s reputation online because of the social and political messages it peddles.

But even if you eliminated the trolls, the show’s audience score would most likely peak at 30 percent. In that regard, I would expect the critic rating to settle in the 60s, showing that critics are not blind to The Acolyte’s weaknesses, but they also appreciate subtle strengths such as the acting and production values.

An 85 percent rating is pure madness. It says that critics absolutely love a productthat audiences completely despise, and that does not make sense. You expect to see that sort of discrepancy with artsy indie projects that critics typically swoon over, not big-budget shows that are explicitly designed to appeal to mainstream audiences.

Before you argue that Rotten Tomatoes does not accurately reflect the critical response to this show, no one cared about The Acolyte. In fact, viewers initially rejected the show because of the lackluster trailers.

Remember Episode 3 from a week ago? Diehard Star Wars fans nearly rioted because it supposedly broke Star Wars canon by hinting at Mae and Osha’s immaculate conception. Casual fans like me don’t care about Star Wars canon. We thought the episode was boring.

And critics? They had early access to the episode and praised it as one of the most mind- blowing 35 minutes of Star Wars they had ever seen. Clearly, something is amiss. It is almost like audiences and critics are watching two different shows. I can’t help but wonder whether the online conspiracies are correct and Hollywood critics are only impressed by The Acolyte because of the diverse cast.

If you argued that the presence of minority characters (black female leads, Asian Jedi, lesbian witches, etc) was actively swaying their opinions, I would have a difficult time disputing your claim.

I agree that art is subjective and some viewers have genuinely enjoyed The Acolyte thus far; however, the drastic difference in audience and critic scores shows that Disney (and Lucasfilm) took a wrong turn somewhere.

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For anyone lucky enough to have experienced the long arc of his career, the death of droll, dry, deadpan Martin Mull, Thursday at 80, feels like the end of an era. A writer, songwriter, musician, comedian, comic actor and, out of the spotlight, a serious painter, Mull was a comfortingly disquieting presence — deceptively normal, even bland, but with a spark of evil. Martin Mull is with us, one felt, and that much at least is right with the world.

There was a sort of timelessness in his person. As a well-dressed, articulate young person, he seemed older than his years; later on, owl-eyed behind his spectacles, he came across as oddly boyish.

He leaves behind a long, uninterrupted string of screen credits, beginning with Norman Lear’s small-town soap opera satire “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” Following that were regular roles in “Roseanne,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” “Veep” and “Arrested Development”; guest shots including “Taxi” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”; and work in such films as “Mr. Mom,” “Clue” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

And so it seemed he would always be around, and working. Even so, his appearances were never quite expected, or in the expected place. But he was ever welcome, and always right for the job.

Like Steve Martin, his friend and junior by two years, he was an accomplished instrumentalist. As a purveyor of witty comic songs, Mull was in the tradition of Tom Lehrer and Flanders and Swann and a peer of Dan Hicks, with whom he shared a taste in floral-print shirts. He was a countercultural cabaret artist who set himself apart from the counterculture. Again like Martin, he dressed well in an age when younger comics let their hair grow long and wore street clothes to distinguish themselves from their suit-and-tie elders.

But where Martin was a flurry of flapping arms and legs, Mull worked from a place of stillness. His musical stage act, Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture, found him in his signature prop, a big armchair, leaning forward over his big, hollow-body guitar.

“Ever seen one of these before? It’s electric. You’ll be seeing a lot of those in the near future,” he said.

Later, he leaned back as Barth Gimble, the host of the talk show parodies “Fernwood 2 Night” and “America 2 Night.” Even his solo spots on “The Tonight Show” — on which he was a hilarious, blue-streak-talking guest, usually playing off his career in show business — were delivered sitting.

On “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Mull played Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who died impaled on the star of a Christmas tree. One would say that Garth had to die in order that Barth, his twin brother, might live. On the spun-off “Fernwood 2 Night,” Mull and Fred Willard, as confidently dim sidekick Jerry Hubbard, created a telepathic double act in which they could seem antithetical expressions of a single character.

Together, the talk shows lasted only two summer seasons; but due to their weeknight appearances, they produced 130 episodes, giving them cultural weight. (You may find them extracted all over the internet.) Mull and Willard would work together again over the years, in the Cinemax series “The History of White People in America” and the follow-up feature “Portrait of a White Marriage,” in commercials for Red Roof Inn, as a gay couple on “Roseanne” and as robots on “Dexter’s Laboratory.”

Mull grew up in North Ridgeville, Ohio, not far from Fernwood in the map of the imagination, and white insularity was a theme in his comedy. My first Mull memory came with the 1973 album “Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room,” which opened with a version of “Dueling Banjos” played on tubas. The record included a “Lake Erie delta” blues song, purportedly learned from his real estate agent grandfather. It was performed on a ukulele with a baby bottle used as a slide: “I woke up this afternoon / Both cars were gone / I felt so low down deep inside / I threw my drink across the lawn.”

“The History of White People in America,” he told David Letterman, would examine “what, if anything, has the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant done in this country since World War I. It’ll be taking a pretty good hard look at that.”

A memorable episode of “Fernwood” exhibits a Jewish person stopped for speeding as he passed through town as something of an exotic animal, for the benefit of Fernwoodians who may have “actually never seen a real live Jew before.”

“I hope that seat’s all right,” Barth says, welcoming his guest. “ I’m not sure what you’re used to.”

Like many great comedians — the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields before him, or Albert Brooks in his own time — Mull was a temperamental outsider who achieved the success of an insider, while remaining essentially untamed. It’s not beside the point that he was, from first to last, a serious artist. He held undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design — where, it does not seem too coincidental to mention, the Talking Heads were born. He would refer to show business as a “day job” that allowed him to pursue painting.

We were lucky he needed the work.

An intriguing romantic relationship but also a series of issues in Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts

Shot in Sri Lanka, “Ben and Suzanne” is a film that unfolds on a number of levels, from a tour guide to the country to the exploration of a rather complicated relationship. It is Shaun Seneviratze’s feature debut and it was shot mostly with local non-actors.

Ben Santhanaraj travels to Sri Lanka in order to reunite with Suzanne Hopper, who works for a local NGO, after a long separation. However, although his plans were to see the country and have a good time with her, she is stuck with work, which comes up at any given time. As time passes, their relationship is being tested by both the fact and a number of other episodes, while the ego and individuality of both seems to place another set of burdens.

Allow me to start with the negative. There are two archetypes of Western people living in Asian countries, or even simply staying for a bit. The one is the ‘savior’ who probably works for a Western NGO and tries to help, considering their effort life-altering for the locals, in a most of the time rather big misconception. The second is the ‘tourist’ who just wants to have a good time inside the usual bubble tourists experience, retaining as many of the tendencies they keep in their country of living, frequently complaining about everything. These two rather annoying archetypes do not represent everyone of course, but are quite prevalent, and they are also exactly the personas of the two protagonists. Suzanne is the ‘savior’ and Ben is the ‘tourist’.

Expectedly, and considering they both consider their wants as above everything, they soon find themselves clashing, with each one, but particularly Ben actually flaunting the aforementioned to each other, in probably one of most entertaining and realistic aspects of the narrative. At the same time, though, and in a yet another annoying aspect of the movie, there is no indication why those two ever got together. They seem to have nothing in common, or ever had for that matter, maybe except from the fact that he likes to make her laugh by clowning and she is quite susceptible to it. Whether that is enough for a relationship does not sound like a question with a positive answer.

The above essentially makes the whole approach of the movie somewhat naive, particularly because it also includes an outsider’s epidermal view of the country, especially when one compares it with a similar film we watched recently, “Paradise” by Prasanna Vithanage, or any other local films for that matter.

There are, however, a number of things that do work for the film. For starters, the chemistry of the two protagonists is impressive, with Anastasia Olowin as Suzanne and Sathya Sridharan as Ben presenting the fact that they have known each other for some time and that they both have changed quite eloquently. Their rapport is quite entertaining to watch, particularly in the erotic scenes and the moments they have fun with each other. Their fights could have been handled a bit better, but overall, this aspect is one of the best of the movie.

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The same applies to the cinematography, with the 1:1 ratio giving a very appealing retro essence to the movie, and the overall capturing of the country by Molly Scotti is occasionally impressive to watch, despite the focus on realism. Joe Violette’s editing could have been a bit better in the succession of the scenes, but the overall pace is definitely fitting.

“Ben and Suzanne” has its merits, and the relationship in its center is appealing to watch. However, it frequently feels as a film that was supposed to be shot in the US, just found itself in Sri Lanka without being able to realize the difference or what to do with the fact.