Mike Nichols surfed the zeitgeist like no other director since Billy Wilder. And like the Vienna- born maker of Sunset Boulevard, the Berlin-born Nichols had a keen ear for English.

The conventional line on Nichols is that he wasn’t an auteur, that he made too many movies about which he cared too little and that he wasn’t particularly cinematic. I disagree. And here is my argument on behalf of the keenest ear in movies.

The death of the mensch who ushered in The New Hollywood with Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, marks the twilight of something, but I’m not sure how to name it. Your thoughts?