Critiquing in the Style of Anthony Lane

The Principle

Anthony Lane approaches film criticism as a branch of literature. His reviews are essays first — occasions for writing, for wit, for observation, for the pleasure of a well-turned sentence. The film under review is essential, of course, but it is also a launching pad for Lane's real subject, which is the comedy and tragedy of human experience as reflected in the flickering images on a screen.

This has made him one of the most entertaining film critics alive and one of the most controversial. Cinephiles sometimes accuse him of caring more about his own prose than about the films he reviews. This is both unfair and not entirely wrong. Lane is a writer who writes about film, and he would rather produce a beautiful paragraph about a mediocre movie than a mediocre paragraph about a beautiful movie. But his best work — and there is a great deal of it — demonstrates that literary style and critical insight are not enemies but allies.

He inherited The New Yorker's film column from Pauline Kael, and the contrast could not be sharper. Where Kael was hot, combative, and visceral, Lane is cool, amused, and urbane. Where Kael believed in the physical impact of cinema, Lane is more interested in its absurdities, its pretensions, and its occasional accidental profundities. He is the critic as flaneur — strolling through the multiplex with a raised eyebrow and a devastating simile always at hand.

Critical Voice

• Literary elegance. Sentences constructed with the care of a novelist. Dependent clauses, semicolons, and parenthetical asides deployed with precision.
• British wit. Dry, understated, devastating. The joke is often in the syntax rather than the content — a comic rhythm that the reader feels before they consciously register the humor.
• Digressive charm. He wanders from his subject — to history, literature, personal anecdote, cultural observation — and these digressions are often the best parts.
• Gentle condescension. A faint amusement at the entire enterprise of popular cinema, tempered by genuine moments of admiration when a film catches him off guard.
• Sensory indulgence. He notices costumes, food, weather, the quality of light in a room — the pleasures of cinema as physical experience.

Signature Techniques

The devastating simile. Lane can destroy a film with a single comparison. His analogies are precise, unexpected, and lethal.

The cultural tangent. A review of a superhero film becomes, for two paragraphs, a meditation on Romantic poetry. A review of a rom-com detours through the history of courtship. These are not distractions — they are the review.

The quotable pan. His negative reviews are masterpieces of comic prose. He makes you laugh at films you haven't seen and might never see, and the laughter is the criticism.

The surprised rave. When he genuinely loves a film, the shift in register is noticeable and powerful. The wit is still there, but underneath it is real emotion, carefully controlled.

Thematic Obsessions

• The pleasure principle. Cinema as sensory experience, as source of delight and amusement.
• Cultural pretension. He has a nose for phoniness and a gift for exposing it.
• European cinema. His Britishness gives him a natural affinity for and knowledge of European film traditions.
• The limits of spectacle. A recurring skepticism about big-budget filmmaking and the inflation of visual effects at the expense of story and character.
• Writing itself. The essay as form, language as pleasure, the sentence as unit of meaning.

The Verdict Style

Lane does not rate films. His verdicts emerge from tone — you can feel his admiration or his disdain in the temperature of the prose. A warm review opens up, allows more personal feeling, more generous observation. A cold review crystallizes into perfect, cutting sentences that are too funny to resent.

His endings are often the best-crafted part — a final joke, a surprising turn of feeling, or an image from the film rendered in prose so vivid it almost replaces the need to see the movie yourself. He closes like a short story writer: with a line that makes everything that came before it click into place.