Award-winning film critic Jim Hoberman has been laid off by The Village Voice, where he has been a staff writer for 29 years.

“I would be disingenuous to say I hadn’t considered the possibility that this would happen to me eventually,” he told Joe Coscarelli, a former Village Voice writer. “I was shocked, but not surprised.”

Hoberman wrote his first review for the paper – a review of David Lynch’s Eraserhead – in 1977. He has been recognized in AAN’s AltWeekly Awards on four occasions, twice receiving first-place for Arts Criticism.

The Los Angeles Times has picked some of Hoberman’s most memorable lines, and over at the New York Observer, Voice-alum Foster Kamer rounds up the reaction from current and former Village Voice staffers.