Criticism: A query

Unless the folks over at FILM ROTATION mind, I'm just going to quote their entire entry here because I think its such an interesting question in regard to film critics vs. book critics vs. music critic vs., say, a technology critic. How much of a deciding factor do critics of various fields have on the general consumer?

FILM ROTATION : V4 - A Blog for Film-Geeks!: Regardless of being universally panned by US critics - with UK critics seemingly following suite - as we're all aware Fantastic Four shot to the top of the US box office in its opening weekend with $56m making it the third biggest opening of the year after Revenge Of The Sith and War Of The Worlds.

Fox Studios executive Hutch Parker says, 'When you have a weekend like this, you've got to question, what is the relevance of reviewers to viewers at large?'

So this is a question I want to open up in the ol' ATB area... Really, how relevant are the critics these days? Ebert savaged both War of the Worlds and Wedding Crashers only for both to blossom fantastically. At the opposite end of the scale, the critics both in America [and at present internationally] raved about Cinderella Man, some calling it the movie of the year, only for it to flop quite severely.

Do reviews matter? With Fantastic Four as an example, does bad word of mouth even matter either? If it had just been FF then I'd have blamed the good box office on people turning out to see a car-wreck (but then they didn't do it with Gigli did they?), but this is steadily turning into a more and more regular occurence... critics speak out, the paying public act the opposite.

What do you guys think? My personal example would be the rather forgettable Ladder 49 - asides from Ebert, I have not found a single positive review of this film but at the same time I've never spoken to anyone who didn't enjoy it. Are the critics sitting too way up on the old high horse? Have they lost touch with the general viewing public?