Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

They've had a twitter feed for awhile now, and frequently sent out round-ups of rep screenings.

I hope Agee's on the wagon--shouldn't Twitter while drunk.

farber wrote for all those publications! also he is dead, and hadn't been writing criticism since 1978. but i'd love to hear what he has to say about neighbors!

xpost beat me to it!

If they're having a historical section, again, great, all for it. It was as much Brody's name on its own that jumped out at me. The New Yorker had one or two other great critics they might want to add, ditto The New Republic.

I wonder if they are including niche writers like Tony Rayns and Grady Hendrix; I'll read anything by them that I can get my hands on.

"niche" meaning = Asia

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-ad-hominem-ad-nauseam

yeah, was tempted to put that in the Armond thread

that Cinemania '94 CD-ROM to which he alludes was invaluable to me.

Yeah, I had the '96 version.

'95er over here

well, that was a completely useless article.

sounds like you've never been lambasted by a filmmaker in a comments section

i prefer slow-roasted to lam-basted

are we supposed to congratulate these dudes for ad hominem attacks or at the very least feel compassion for them, idgi. pretty telling in kenny's blog was matt zoller seitz's story about how this ed champion guy retweeted MZS's personal remembrance of his wife on what would have been her 40th birthday and implied that they didn't love each other. kind of crazy how even armond white doesn't hold a candle to ed champion or np thompson in the ranks of the unhappy sociopathic misogynistic creeps of internet film writing.

all these people deserve each other, no? maybe not MZS. but kenny, white, et al, they seem to live to rile other critics up. i think they like doing that more than they like movies, honestly.

Film criticism does seem to attract certain...personality types, that's for sure

I don't know what you are taking about, puss hole.

lol

I guess I haven't followed Glenn Kenny's battles. I read him regularly until he left MSN.

He's a good writer and a smart critic, but he has a tendency to lurk around Jeffrey Wells' site. I've never had any run-ins with him, but a lot of people I know have and detest him to varying degrees because of it.

he can't seem to resist winding other critics up and then kind of ruefully apologizing for being a bad man.

David Ehrenstein is a nasty lurker too.

that guy is an infamous troll from way way back

like, 1990s

I think GK wrote a brief swipe at my review of Sound of Music for daring to suggest its song score wasn't R&H's best work.

i think GK is a bad writer. or at least he's an exemplar of that impacted, hyper-allusive, many-parentheticaled style that i really dislike.

The NY Times decided to let Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, two underwhelming poli columnists (and for mer film critics! who knew?) bat around summer blockbusters for their zeitgest content. Chas Pierce does a quick drive-by, and David Bordwell digs deep, in response.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Critical_Mass

It turns out that the heavy moviegoers, those going once a month or more, are currently just 11% of the population.... Moviegoers are atypical of the population in other respects. Since the beginning, Hollywood cinema has catered to the middle class. Moviegoers have been younger, better educated, and better-off economically than non-moviegoers.

The real mass medium of our time is network television (as radio was before). On one night, a single episode of The Big Bang Theory can attract 19 million viewers. A film that had that viewership across an opening weekend would take in over $150 million. That is $50 million more than the latest Transformers movie garnered at its debut. If Messrs. Douthat and Bruni want to take the national temperature, they should watch TV–ideally, the ads on the Super Bowl (shown to 112 million viewers).

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/08/24/zip-zero-zeitgeist/

I've found some of Hoberman's theorizing about "Obama cinema" pretty silly, so I larfed here (JH first, Bordwell second):

"The longing for Obama (or an Obama) can be found in two prescient 2008 movies—WALL-E (the world saved by an endearing little dingbot, community organizer for an extinct community) and Milk (portrait of another creative community organizer—not to mention a precedent-shattering politician who, it’s very often reiterated, presented himself as a Messenger of Hope)."

This is nearly a miracle. Somehow these filmmakers sensed that Americans (well, 53% of the people voting) were yearning to be led by a community organizer. But how specifically could the filmmakers have arrived at that prescience? In fact, they would have had to be long-range prophets. Milk began as a 1992 project, and the final version of the script was prepared in 2007. The Pixar adepts started talking about WALL-E in 1994 and began drafting scripts in 2002. Why don’t we ask filmmakers to predict our next president right now?

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/886166/thumbs/o-HILLARY-CLINTON-MERYL-STREEP-570.jpg?5

Robostreep lining up her 2020s biopics

"The essential film book of this or almost any year is The Essential Raymond Durgnat, edited by Henry K. Miller and published by the British Film Institute. It begins with a blast: 12 pages of "Standing Up for Jesus", which Durgnat wrote for the short-lived Motion in 1963, when he was 31. His specific target is Sight and Sound, but he takes broad aim at a vast, three-headed system of dominant tastes and values...."

happy to give nrq a plug

http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/11499

For some reason I thought this was around for longer than it actually has (paperbk published in September).

Excellent, love almost all of the Durgnat I've read so hopefully I'll get myself a copy soon.

Stephanie Zacharek moves to TIME from the Village Voice.

also:

“If you’re still mourning the loss of The Dissolve, some good news,” announces Sam Adams at Criticwire. “Writers Scott Tobias, Keith Phipps, and Tasha Robinson have launched a new podcast called The Next Picture Show, which effectively translates the site’s ‘Movie of the Week’ feature into audio form.” The idea is to pair a classic with a current release, and in the inaugural episode, they discuss Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) and Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight.

http://thenextpictureshow.tumblr.com/

mark cousins, danny leigh, jonathan romney....

Anyone know what happened to Nick Pinkerton's Bombast column?

In other news, Film Comment is trying to get their podcast going.

he seems to write for Artforum regularly now

i vaguely recall him grumping that Bombast was in limbo, and his last one on the FC site is from July; just reviews and interviews since.

website that goes with the new NYC rep theater -- prose by Molly Haskell, Luc Sante, Tsai etc

http://173.203.144.106/edition

tho our tastes often diverge, Glenn Kenny does these Blu-ray rundowns very well:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2016/07/return-of-the-son-of-blu-ray-consumer-guide-july-fourth-weekend-2016-edition.html

sad day. RIP michel delahaye

Molly Haskell has a new book out, Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films. Def read the Seitz interview on Ebert.com.

“Where my book (From Reverence to Rape)actually ran into the most trouble was with the party-line feminists, like Ms. Magazine, which chose not to run an excerpt because of my thesis that women had been better off in movies when the studios ran things. This ran counter to their idea of progress: the belief that women in movies were doing better in the 70s. Eventually, everybody saw that they weren’t—that they had more roles, and more interesting roles, in older movies.”

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/molly-haskell-steven-spielberg

http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/molly-haskell-on-feminism-censorship-screwball-comedy-and-life-after-andrew-sarris

Does anyone here follow particular imdb reviewers? I've recently discovered the funny, pointed, and often perceptive reviews of "Max von Meyerling," who has covered a hodgepodge of different films - some commercial hits, many Hollywood obscurities, lots of older European cinema (seldom anything of-the-minute). 142 reviews in total.

From info he reveals in the reviews, it seems he's about 70, a New Yorker, and claims to have once been an art critic.

(Max von Mayerling is Gloria Swanson's butler in Sunset Boulevard).

I haven't, but I'd like to see his – got a link?

Google is my friend http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0740315/

He has already proved his worth, by alerting me to the existence of this remake

http://i.imgur.com/UmD3N70.jpg

Keith Uhlich spies a trend, spurred by John Wick 2, he calls The New Competence:

Recent New Competence films are, for me, stuff like La La Land, A Cure for Wellness and this, which seem designed as self-conscious "coherent" antitheses to the haphazard aesthetics that have proliferated in mainstream moviemaking. Yet they all lack that intangible something that would make them great, or even good. You can "see" them clearly, but there's little, between the lines, to really see.

It's a term I came up with, and like any such grouping, it's more than a bit of a shallow catch-all. I'm more a believer that each movie is unique and creates its own specific analytical problems. But creating a grouping helps me organize some of my thoughts and feelings on the art of the moment, and hopefully go deeper, if not in writing, then in conversation or reflection.
I also agree that craft itself can be meaning, and the craft here I think conjures a moral vacuum that rubs me the wrong way. The movie made me soul-sick, all the more so because of its arch pretensions to Buster Keaton-esque comedy, its thoughtless stereotyping of characters and character actors, and its numbingly pie-eyed adoration of firearms. At this moment, I'm just not able to find much fun in treating an AR rifle like a fine wine.

film critics can't afford fine wine gtfo

Good obit for Richard Schickel by MZ Seitz. His Hitchcock episode of The Men Who Made the Movies and the CBS special about the history of Hollywood film comedy in '77 meant more to me than the TIME reviews. And I still have to read my copy of his 1968 book The Disney Version.

http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-art-of-entertainment-richard-schickel-1931-2017