Duncan Shepherd, a longtime film critic, wrote a weekly column for the alternative weekly the San Diego Reader from 1972 until November 2010. Shepherd's pithy, incisive, and (in later years) very often negative reviews have sparked strong reactions from readers.Shepherd attended Columbia University ("a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City", according to the critic) and received a Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego.