Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

I HEARTILY recommend the movie "Il Mio Viaggio en Italia" directed by Scorcese. It is not of the "consumer guide" school of criticism, but rather "such and such makes me feel magical, and I want you to feel this way too". Magic!

Ebert's tastes:
* Usually thinks favorably of documentaries. He named Hoop Dreams the best film of the 90s, and he called Gates of Heaven (a *wonderful* doc about a pet cemetery) one of his all-time favorite movies.
* Usually overlooks flaws in favor of experimentation. He was very impressed with Natural Born Killers because of the risks it took, and didn't penalize it for being, uhm, self-indulgent.
* Likes sexy movies. The guy WROTE Beyond the Valley of the Dolls fer cryin' out loud.
* Doesn't buy into hype. He (or his paper) pays for all his own expenses at press junkets, instead of enjoying their freebies, I heard. Sometimes I think he actually penalizes hype. For example, he liked Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels but didn't like Snatch (which I thought was nearly as good).
* Usually likes philosophical movies.
* Likes Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, and Angelina Jolie. This explains the positive reviews for Tomb Raider, Original Sin, Riding in Cars with Boys, Scream 2, etc.
* Reviews films within their genre. If I'm not mistaken, he caught a lot of flak for recommending some Benji movie and giving a thumbs-down to Full Metal Jacket the same week. I think his stance was that Benji, as a kids' movie, was good. Full Metal Jacket, being uneven and unsatisfying, was a Vietnam movie that didn't deliver.

The movie reviewers for the Onion's AV Club are usually pretty tough customers, so when they strongly recommend something, I usually take note.

Also recommended: Vern. See for yourself.

Removing the self-indulgence from "NBK" would remove 70% of the satire.

this is what s. zacharek said abt attack of the clones. it is just one of MANY reasons why she is grebt

and yes lucid and clear is redundant.

I agree completely. Well, make that 75%. The film *had* to be completely unrestrained. That said, watching Oliver Stone masturbate is not agreeable to everyone. Some care, some don't.

I do think that in general most film reviewers are cockfarmers. They seem to fall into two camps - either they are Empire-style chasers of whatever's popular, or else they are up their own arses pretentious film afficionados.

I don't think I've ever read a written movie review except to glance across it when browsing a (usually outdated) newspaper.

It wouldn't matter anyway because I like (almost) everything I see (I don't watch suspense movies, so I don't get a chance to not like them).

I do like analyses of movies though, no matter how the author has read the movie. Analyses rock!

I think I will go to bed now though. Thanks for reminding me of the ungodly o'clock that it is.

This guy consistenly blows me away with very short capsule reviews. And since there is a very high chance I fucked that link up here it is again: http://leonardo.spidernet.net/Artus/2386/

sound pretty good to me;

anyway, that critic can't talk: she has actual commercials splattered ludicrously through her text.

the best British newspaper film writer is Romney in the IoS, I think...

...but only because David Thomson now has an American passport.

David Thomson is the king of kings but he does suffer a bit from Meltzer's disease - ie modern cinema is rub. Bradshaw continues the great Guardian tradition of utterly shite film critics (Malcolm, Richard Williams etc.) Does Nigel Andrews still write for the FT? He wrote a fantastic slag job of 'Phantom Menace' (which I know = shooting fish in a barrel, but in this case his criticisms were utterly OTM and made w/ gd humour).

Antonia Quirke in the IOS is prob. the worst 'serious' newspaper critic that I know abt.

The shark fin canapes were nice afterwards and she had a nice pink top on.

Yeah, because that's her doing, not Salon's.

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times is pretty solid, and deserves respect for having raised James Cameron's ire for panning Titanic when it first came out. Also, Paul Tatara used to do a good job reviewing movies for cnn.com, but it appears that he's not writing for them anymore.

Not really: he is always praising new films. His sense of the moral is one thing that sets him apart from many; so, as my editor once said re. Fast-Talking Dames, is his ability with ambivalence.

>>> Bradshaw continues the great Guardian tradition of utterly shite film critics (Malcolm, Richard Williams etc.)

I don't think I see what's so awful about Bradshaw. Certainly Malcolm became a slug, but I don't think Williams awful either.

>>> Antonia Quirke in the IOS is prob. the worst 'serious' newspaper critic that I know abt.

She's still in the IoS?? I thought she'd moved on. I heard her on Stuart Maconie's R2 show (!!), where she was irritating re. S&S Top Movies etc. Is she meant to be foxy? (I am going by comments above.)

Actually, AQ's worst flaw surely = too much casual swearing in print. Unforgivable.

Surprisingly, among the NYT crew, I've really been digging A.O. Scott's writing lately. I wish he'd write about music in the same earnest, bookish way. Seriously! He's great. Elvis hasn't been doing much for me these days. End of year best-of lists comparison!

A.O. Scott

1. Talk to Her
2. The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
3. Adaptation
4. Far From Heaven
5. The Pianist
6. Spirited Away
7. Storytelling
8. Gangs of New York
9. Lovely and Amazing
10. Punch Drunk Love

Elvis Mitchell

1. Bloody Sunday
2. Catch Me If You Can
3. Morvern Callar
4. Paid in Full
5. Personal Velocity
6. Spirited Away
7. Talk to Her
8. 24 Hour Party People
9. What Time is it There?
10. Y Tu Mama Mambien

I was thinking the exact same thing in connection to this. Except I think it would unfold like this: some interviewer in 2018 would ask Kael to "clarify" her Last Tango review, she'd respond in a way that amounted to "Oh, please," and the next day she'd be out of a job.

There will probably be a number of pieces like this in the coming days:

http://www.salon.com/2018/11/28/david-edelstein-the-butter-scene-in-last-tango-and-the-darkness-of-the-internet/

"I suspect what befell Edelstein this week is only partly about one stupid Facebook post, and has more to do with the messy process of generational change and the inevitable Schadenfreude surrounding someone who holds two prestigious media jobs, either of which many other people would kill and eat their grandmothers to get."

I don't expect I'll get much agreement here, but--conceding that they bring some of it onto themselves--I think there's an element of that behind some of the carping about Christgau, Marcus, and Bill James on ILX.

no need to carp about Christgau because all of his writing is awful. that quote is OTM though

I'm sure these media companies are happy to take any excuse to axe folks with any seniority, especially who write about fiyulms, cause who fucking cares about those anymore

Maria Schneider never said she was *actually* raped in the butter scene; she said she stayed friends with Brando, and that all the sex was simulated.

Edelstein knows that. Martha Plimpton doesn't (too busy writing about what her "favorite abortion" was, it seems).

I think it's possible that (much like his Green Book comment) he meant something that's actually in line with what snowflakes would endorse...Or not. I don't know

I've seen the joke now, and agree with this. As humour, it's not much more than a lame reference to what I take it (I don't remember) is an old advertising slogan for butter. Not particularly offensive, definitely not funny. If you try to extract meaning from it, all I get is either a) a complete non-sequitur, prompted only by the fact that this slogan popped into Edelstein's head, or b) a dig at Bertolucci, the idea that he's getting a pass in death for this infamous scene. I don't know.

I'd have to check it (I might be misremembering), but I suspect that Kael's review of Straw Dogs is another one that'd get her fired today.

Maybe this one moment in film and social history isn't really about Pauline Kael.

Actually, I think it very much is in a way.

Well, good luck convincing your kindergartners of that.

In a both a broad sense--what could you write or say 40 years ago that you can't today?--and also very specifically (Edelstein was once viewed as a "Paulette," Last Tango is Kael's most infamous review). We bring her up all the time (not just me) where she's not really relevant, but this time she is.

I am going to talk about this today as a good example of why kids have to realize that anything they write online never goes away. (Grade 3/4, by the way.)

Maria Schneider never said she was *actually* raped in the butter scene; she said she stayed friends with Brando, and that all the sex was simulated.

That's not the whole issue, though. The sex was simulated, but she clearly felt coerced and humiliated in doing the scene. She says she "felt a little raped." I get why a joke that takes that cavalierly wouldn't go over well.

Kinda surprised that Martha Plimpton never said Schneider was raped, but that she was sexually assaulted, which she definitely was? It's ironic that it's the commenters angry at 'rape' being brought into this, who are in fact the ones who brought 'rape' into this.

Oh wait, Salon didn't have all of her tweet. Ok, everyone is bad, sigh.

but that she was sexually assaulted, which she definitely was?

not touching this

http://www.startribune.com/star-tribune-film-critic-resigns-after-ethics-breach/502410192/

If you're gonna plagiarize, don't choose Kael, for chrissake.

seems like a weird kind of plagiarism

Trying to figure out what Kael called "self-glorifying masochistic mush" in 1974.

Plagiarisers are idiots but they're the creation of a maniacal industry that gives its staff constant & un-meetable deadlines, little job security, shitty wages and zero though to work-life balance. By all means blame this idiot writer, but the structures of newspaper and digital journalism are built for plagiarism.

The Little Prince
UK (1974): Musical/Dance

The Saint-Exupéry book, the first of the modern mystic-quest books to become a pop hit, is a distillation of melancholy, and it comes close to being self-glorifying, masochistic mush. Possibly something might have been made of the material if Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the movie script, along with the lyrics for Frederick Loewe's music, had a more delicate feeling for spiritual yearning. The director, Stanley Donen, is handicapped by the intractably graceless writing and by the Big Broadway sound of the Lerner-Loewe score. Bob Fosse's snake-in-the-grass dance number is the film's high spot, and Gene Wilder, as a red fox, triumphs over some of his material. As the child Prince, Steven Warner holds the screen affectingly; as the author-aviator, Richard Kiley is pleasant enough but colorless.

“Just like real soldiers who are numb to war” Reading these tweets one can imagine how it must have felt to be a tea boy in the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma circa 1954 overhearing a conversation between André Bazin and Éric Rohmer. pic.twitter.com/RcJgGE4fQc

— David Franklin (@davefranklin) December 16, 2019

David Edelstein is now behind a pay wall--only critic I checked regularly.

richard brody used the word "dinosaurically" in his latest column. i trust him to write things that are readable.

i often do not agree with him, but he's more interesting than more "measured" critics. in my view.

It's not really part of my criteria for judging a critic, but I do find myself in sync with Edelstein more often than not. But not always--he put Uncut Gems in his Top 10, as a recent example.

did u not like it? i'm interested in seeing it

See it. I'm a dissenting minority of one.

Vulture seems to waft back and forth with their paywall / article limit, but private browsing is all it takes to get around it.

Hey thanks--works!

Kenneth Turan stepping down as LA Times film critic after 30 yrs

no films to critique

it's hard out here for a critic

James Cameron won.

Not sure if this was posted elsewhere but Film Comment being mothballed after next issue.


https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/covid-19-update-from-film-at-lincoln-center/

Last issue: First Cow

I actually came on here to see if Peter Bradshaw was any good (there's a discounted collection on the book-clearance site I buy from)--the very first post tells me no.

I've been listening to the Unspooled podcast, and it's odd, I really enjoy it and their perspectives but I don't trust *either* of them. Not their opinions, not their tastes, not much of anything. But I do like their general positivity and respect for one another even when they clearly disagree, and perhaps because of that I've learned a few things and learned to reassess a few things despite how often my own preferences and opinions diverge.

very first post otm

I like Peter Bradshaw. I would take his reviews over most other newspaper critics. He often likes what I would like, and the other way round, and that is enough for me.

Has David Edelstein left New York? I was hoping to find a Mank review from him, but he hasn't reviewed anything since September (many reviews since by other writiers). His Wikipedia page doesn't mention him leaving.

(Writiers are like writers, but much more refined.)

This is a useful site that I periodically think has gone down because I can't remember how to locate it:

https://www.mistdriven.com/

The "Critics' Top Ten" section has an index of year-end lists from a whole bunch of critics: Sarris, Hoberman, Rosenbaum, Amy Taubin, even Godard (and Armond White!). Godard's seventh favourite film of 1964 was Love with a Proper Stranger; Hoberman's fifth favourite for 1986 (I still remember this) was Game 6 of the World Series.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/race/critics-choice-association-expels-jeffrey-wells-following-posts-about-atlanta-shootings-exclusive

“Trust” as in “trust to always be a total asshole,” that is.

Sorry wrong thread. For all Arm0nd’s outrages, he is still at the end of the day a critic.

good riddance

This 2004 interview with Owen Gleiberman, freshly reposted to rockcritics.com, is a great read: https://rockcritics.com/2021/03/29/from-the-archives-interview-with-owen-gleiberman-2004/

Wells attributed those views to unnamed "friendos" with whom he says he conversed.

grounds for expulsion on its own imo

Danny Slaski

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWxrHz-JORE

Oh man, I don't know which one comes out worse in this one ...

Without a doubt, the words of a lunatic.

Only a mentally deranged person would use the phrase “quotidian sads” pic.twitter.com/YoUYq6yxjY

— John Magary (@JohnMagary) January 27, 2023

A.O. Scott signs off as NYT film critic:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/movies/film-critic-ao-scott.html

Hmm I see..

AO Scott on leaving his post at NYT as film critic pic.twitter.com/u8kk6ZZKL5

— @gdess (@GDess) March 17, 2023