I always get slightly annoyed at comments like this and I've seen them fired off a lot in threads and discussion pages like this.
You do realise that if that critic or reviewer is ever proven to have accepted a bribe from a studio then their career is OVER? There's no recovering from something like that, especially these days. What amount of money would Disney have to pay these people in order to buy them out? Jim Sterling said that it would have to be ATLEAST what he'd be making in the industry for the rest of his life PLUS an exceptionally large sum of money to pay on top. Even then he stated that any reviewer/critic who's gotten to a position of notoriety couldn't possibly carry on in that position purely on moral grounds.
I just think it's quite a disrespectful thing to dismiss someone's opinion and often their entire career on a hunch that they may have been paid of based on NO evidence whatsoever, other then the fact that they liked or disliked something that you didn't.
And yet it's been going on for years. Advertising gets withdrawn for bad reviews, no more free tickets to see films, no more free merch, etc. I see no reason to trust the review of someone who is going to see a film as a guest of the company.
Off the top of my head, Zzap! 64 magazine years ago were threatened with a withdrawal of advertising for a bad review.
Jeremy Clarkson was banned from test driving Toyotas for describing the Corolla as dull.
Then there's the website Pretend Race Cars. It was famous for trashing race sims. The guy who ran it suddenly received 'sponsorship' to run a car in a real life series from Slightly mad Studios (Pcars2), a company who he'd been particularly harsh against. Eventually he became an 'employee' of SMS. Unsurprisingly all the trashing stopped for them and they were getting praise, whilst other companies where still getting their products trashed. The backlash from his readership was so much he ended up closing the website, but I guess he made a buck or two out of it.
Then you've got all the paid reviews that appear on Amazon for example. A couple of years ago, a family member of mine was literally paid to 'review' products that he'd not even used.
There's big pressure / influence out there to make sure reviewers say the right things I'm afraid.