Philip Neville French OBE (28 August 1933 – 27 October 2015) was an English film critic and radio producer.

French began his career in journalism in the late 1950s, before eventually becoming a BBC Radio producer, and later a film critic.

Upon his death on 27 October 2015, French was referred to by his Observer successor Mark Kermode as "an inspiration to an entire generation of film critics".

[2][3][4] The son of an insurance salesman, he moved frequently throughout his childhood, and was educated at the direct grant Bristol Grammar School[3][5] then at Exeter College, Oxford[6] where he read Law.

French's books include The Movie Moguls: An Informal History of the Hollywood Tycoons (1969) and Westerns, which reappeared in a revised version in 2005.

He was one of the few who saw and wrote humorously about the lost 1969 Yoko Ono film Self-Portrait that exclusively featured the penis of John Lennon.

French was also fond of recalling the B-movie actor who, having exchanged life in Hollywood for a typewriter, called his memoir Forgive Us Our Press Passes.

[20] After years of ill health,[21] French died at his home from a heart attack on 27 October 2015, aged 82, and his ashes were buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

Speaking after his death, The Observer editor John Mulholland said that French was "a giant figure" in the paper's history and "part of its soul for the past 50 years", adding: He was a brilliant critic whose erudition and judgement were respected by generations of cinema lovers and film-makers alike.