Film critics

[greennui]

Which one's do you like/dislike? I must admit that I've never really payed much attention to individual critics. Rosenbaum is probably the only professional critic whose reviews I've actively searched out for.

[thoxans]

nicole brenez, serge daney, tag gallagher (who i've corresponded with, and is a really nice, genuine, thoughtful down-to-earth guy), and olaf moller are some names that spring to mind

can't wait to hear holymanm's contributions to this discussion. i know he loves himself some fine fine film criticism, especially if it includes lots and lots of technical cinematic terminology

[Holymanm]

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[Holymanm]

fine fine film criticism, especially if it includes lots and lots of technical cinematic terminology

i only go for reviews that properly and poignantly utilise the post-cultural lens of the late stage pre-modernist social realist camera obscura

[kanafani]

I stopped really following critics a long time ago, and I am perfectly content with viscerally reacting to movies, and I actually do not feel the need nor do I derive much pleasure from reflecting much on what I’ve seen or trying to understand how it works or why I liked it/disliked it. I’ve learned to respect the mystery I guess. That being said, when I used to pay more attention to critics, rosenbaum and Hoberman were the two that Impacted me the most. I have not read much from him, but Gilberto Perez’s the Material Ghost is probably my favorite book of movie criticism. I read some bazin books years ago that I found really eye opening. I initially read some shitty translations that put me off, but then reread them in French and it made a world of difference. That is all I can think of at this moment.

[sally]

i don't read much/any film criticism/theory/anything, mainly because if it's insightful and makes me see things in films i hadn't seen before i get ridiculously over-excited and then can't watch anything at all for days. i have almost a shelf-ful of film-related books that i'm pretty sure i'll never ever read because they contain so much dark magic that i'll go blind

so mainly just use film critics for their taste in recommending things to watch - lourcelles, rissient, marias, alanen, brenez, bordwell & thompson, martin, david cairns, twitter

[nrh]

if you mean the kind of critics who write new reviews of new releases like rosenbaum used to unfortunately i don't really follow anyone these days. partially that is just due to how poor the american new release model is and how poor our remaining newspapers and magazines are...

for people who write about film more broadly and are still writing i follow adrian martin and christina alvarez lopez, filipe furtado who has been translating more of his recent pieces, olaf moller who's been publishing in english more these days, and even though my spanish is too bad to read anything without garbled google translate i try to keep up with la vida util magazine critics and roger koza's blog (con los ojos abiertos).

for older writing, or book length writing, i second kanafani's peretz recommendation. and miguel marias is great, as is brenez although i rarely ever agree with what she's saying. i've been re-reading durgnat a lot and love those books..manny farber is the greatest and that library of america book is a treasure. my favorite ever film website was probably the short lived rouge.com.au

[kanafani]

Ah yes manny farber how could I forgot him. That library of America book brought me so much pleasure.

[Joks Trois]

Martin is good but shallow, and Farber's white elephant vs termite reductionism caused a lot of problems in film criticism, especially in the Anglosphere.

Rosenbaum is noteworthy for sure, but I can't say I follow critics too closely anymore.

Armond White deserves credit for being more honest than most, although I don't trust his views.

[MrCarmady]

Armond White isn't honest, he's just a contrarian troll, although an enjoyable one. Speaking of contrarians, I like Richard Brody's writing at The New Yorker and Ryan Gilbey's at The New Statesman. I'm also a fan of Mick LaSalle's writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. And another contrarian who hasn't been mentioned yet but obviously has to be is Pauline Kael. Oh, and besides all the usual suspects mentioned in this thread, I'll throw in Fernando F. Croce and AS Hamrah's caustic takedowns at n+1.

[Joks Trois]

White is an oddball. I wouldn't say he is a troll exactly.

Brody is good but prone to overstatement.

[thoxans]

i like white. anyone who pathologically detests noah baumbach as much as he does is aight in my book. also, his takedown of beyonce's black is king was frickin hilarious

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

I love good film writing as much as good films, so this is a favourite subject of mine!

My forever favourite is Jonathan Rosenbaum. Discovering his writing was a major moment in my cinephilia. He was my gateway into thinking about film in non-evaluative ways (what is this movie trying to say? what does this movie mean to me personally? what is its political or moral meaning? what is its place in or connection to film history?) and my gateway to film criticism as a conversation, perhaps even with citations. His writing has also taught me so much information: I discovered so many movies and other writers through his work.

I also have deep affection for the capsule review format. My favourite writers of capsule reviews are Dave Kehr and Filipe Furtado, probably others whose names escape me now. I've also gotten endless excitement, as well as a fair amount of frustration, from Andrew Sarris's director capsules in The American Cinema.

In terms of film theory and film scholarship, Bazin is my favourite by a mile. I tend to enjoy good works of film history, both trade and scholarly, but nothing pops immediately to mind. Oh, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema is one treasure I refer to often.

In terms of popular film critics I dislike, I would say I'm not a fan of David Thomson's writing. I enjoy engaging with Pauline Kael for various reasons, but I generally don't like her criticism and find her overrated. No doubt there are others I'm forgetting.

[nrh]

it's funny how transformative rosenbaum's writing is for so many people at the right time in their life. even just the alternate canon lists! and like evelyn said he's always been such a great gateway to other writers and critical traditions; i think that movie mutations book is extremely undervalued, not just for the quality of the writing but the concept and form.

wrt white the troll designation seems totally wrong to me; he's a definite outsider several times over (black, queer, socially and politically conservative), a very different sentence for sentence writer than most of his more middle-brow nyc peers, and has been targeted in really weird ways (i.e. over lowering the rotten tomatoes score for pixar movies or some shit like that); it's not surprising that he's been more than a little pugnacious or contrarian at points. he has also kind of been cut off from any real institutional support and editing, which hasn't helped.

brody i can't say i care for at all; someone (i think it was furtado?) said he's more or less a typical new yorker middle brow with some pet interests (speaking french, american indie mumblecore). that godard book is really quite bad in ways that have been exhaustively discussed elsewhere, but his whole attitude towards film i find kind of gross - eurocentrism aside i can't even imagine the man deigning to watch a genre film...

[liquidnature]

rosenbaum's my goat - succinct, sure, and personal. i enjoy white for obvious reasons and almost always agree with his takes, but like someone else said, not fully congruent. otherwise, i most enjoy non-critic reviews from people like evelyn etc for the unique or even informal perspectives.

[MrCarmady]

All the things you say about White are true but it doesn't stop me from thinking that he's as swayed by the Tomatometer as the hackiest members of the industry, just in the opposite direction. Like I said, I enjoy contrarianism and the takes it produces but in his case it seems to be the main driving factor of his takedowns of movies with 90+ approval ratings. I am not saying these movies are beyond reproach or whatever, I just find a guy disliking all of the following in the last three years a bit attention seeking. One or two or five dissenting opinions, sure, I'd welcome that, but since they're such disparate films it kinda leads me to believe he's churning out these takes only to go against the grain.

Hamilton
First Cow
Little Women
Uncut Gems
Toy Story 4
The Irishman
American Factory
Roma
Cold War
Eighth Grade
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The Favourite
Black KKKLansman
Non-Fiction
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Widows
Mission Impossible: Fallout
Transit
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Blade Runner 2049
The Florida Project
Beach Rats
The Meyerowitz Stories

[Otello Cagliostro]

Serge Daney, André Bazin, Rosenbaum and Bordwell are my go to also the guys at Senses of Cinema do some good articles. Im pretty new to film critics and analysis i used to just watch a movie 50 times to kind of get the point.

Serge Daney as some really great interviews on youtube who are only available in french, maybe i'll translate them someday.

Someone i kind of have a love hate relationship towards his writings is Aster on letterboxd he is truely a contrarian but has some great works espacially his appraisal of Attack of the Clones and the all Prequal trilogy wish is the most totally "just to counter the wave" type of thing but really thoughtful.

Also what do you guys think of Bordwell and his "neo-formalist" approche ?

[wba]

My favorites are Hans Schifferle, Rainer Knepperges, Ivo Ritzer and Olaf Möller.
I also like Nicole Brenez, Ulrich Mannes, Christoph Draxtra, André Malberg and Christoph Huber very much, and usually enjoy Zdenko Vrdlovec, Slavoj Žižek, Alexander Kluge, Lukas Foerster and Marcel Štefančič, jr.
From the dead I like André Bazin, Nika Bohinc and Thomas Elsaesser.

[wba]

Also what do you guys think of Bordwell and his "neo-formalist" approche ?

I like Bordwell and enjoy his approach. But it's not outstanding (or really innovative) for me. Basically he is talking about "basics", in my opinion (things that everyone engaging with film should be aware of from the beginning), which is fine, but gets a bit repetitive over time. Of course he's better than 90% of living film critics still operating, though.

[RenaultR]

I always manage to learn something when reading Rosenbaum. Naturally, there are the classic critics like Sarris, as well as all the mid-century Cahiers du Cinema writing. Kent Jones isn't too bad, even if I don't always agree with him, but he has a pure unapologetic passion for cinema that I find highly contagious.

I'm surprised there's admiration for Armond White on this thread, who I always presumed was a laughing stock. He never actually engages in aesthetic scrutiny of any kind but seems to only talk around the films he discusses in order to launch some diatribe on the "pitiful state of modern culture".

[Otello Cagliostro]

Slavoj Žižek,
From the dead I like André Bazin,

Zizek and Bordwell have beef haha it's pretty funny they wrote several articles against each other. I heard Bazin was pretty skeptical of author theory but still let it be published at the Cahiers, i can't really find anymore information on it (or maybe i didn't look hard enough) but I though that was interesting.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Slavoj Žižek,
From the dead I like André Bazin,

Zizek and Bordwell have beef haha it's pretty funny they wrote several articles against each other. I heard Bazin was pretty skeptical of author theory but still let it be published at the Cahiers, i can't really find anymore information on it (or maybe i didn't look hard enough) but I though that was interesting.

Yes, that's true about Bazin and auteurism. If memory serves, he spent about a year working with Truffaut on his draft of A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, trying to get him to make it a work of well-researched polite aesthetic criticism rather than an envy-ridden youthful polemic, and he unsurprisingly felt he failed.

I like Bordwell and Thompson a lot. That said, I dislike their emphasis on form over content or form as content, rather than on a synthetic treatment of form and content. What I mean is, basically, they love form, and no one is better at treating form than they are, but they oversell it. They make an invalid argument in the first chapter of Film Art: that studying film properly is studying film form only or primarily, because you can't study content without studying form, which is because content is expressed in something that has form. This is just obviously a poor argument, and by the logic of the argument, would equally support (or, rather, equally fail to support) someone saying that studying film is properly only studying content, because form is something that expresses content.

At the only film studies conference I've ever attended, one fellow presenter told me "If you don't study form, you don't study movies," or "If you're not interested in form, you're not interested in movies," or words to this effect. In context, I took her to mean, 'study form primarily or exclusively', as opposed to say content, or legal or financial history. Which is a big claim, and isn't true, because *movies are about things* and because *the movie industry is an industry*. But it's an attitude that, unfortunately, is promoted by Bordwell & Thompson's textbook being the standard textbook in English-language universities these days. I don't think there's a better set of textbooks on the market than Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art and Film History, but I think the teacher should emphasize that Bordwell & Thompson are promoting a particular formalist approach that is not the only legitimate way to study movies.

[wba]

Slavoj Žižek,
From the dead I like André Bazin,

I heard Bazin was pretty skeptical of author theory but still let it be published at the Cahiers, i can't really find anymore information on it (or maybe i didn't look hard enough) but I though that was interesting.

Yeah, Bazin was a bit less enthusiastic about it than the guys who were advocates for it (like the "young guys" during the late 50s), but he wasn't against it. It just weren't his ideas/theories, etc. You can find some information on it, if you read some of his books with his essays. Don't know in which one (and in which essay) there's more of it, though. As far as I can remember it (it's been some time since I read Bazin...) he doesn't write much about it one way or the other. But he seems to have generally been very supportive of many young french writers, and of them expressing their views (be it "la politique des auteurs" or whatever).

[wba]

Yes, that's true about Bazin and auteurism. If memory serves, he spent about a year working with Truffaut on his draft of A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, trying to get him to make it a work of well-researched polite aesthetic criticism rather than an envy-ridden youthful polemic, and he unsurprisingly felt he failed.

Yeah, that text by Truffaut is really shitty. Very cringeworthy, but I guess that's the usual ignorance of youth. I'd say Bazin just had a soft spot for young film enthusiasts.

[wba]

Slavoj Žižek,

Zizek and Bordwell have beef haha it's pretty funny they wrote several articles against each other.

I wasn't aware of that, but it makes sense as they are primarily interested in different things. Zizek is more of a philosopher/intellectual, unearthing (hidden) meanings and ideas and concepts in movies, while Bordwell is in comparison a bit of a pedantic public servant, saying the formal aspects are the essence, and looking at what the filmmaker does and tries to express with their specific use of technique (at a certain time, under certain conventions), so one is a playful analyst who's trying to use films and transform them into something else through his writings, while the other is a bit of a nitpicker. I guess nowadays the "zeitgeist" pendulum might have swung back a bit in the direction of Bordwell, but it used to be totally in Zizeks field during the late 80s. Both have interesting things to say, but Zizek is trying to expand your views, while Bordwell is telling you to look more closely. That's very much a very clichéd summary of the guys by me, and Zizek has done some magnificent and detailed formal analyses of certain films in some of his work (though he arrives at mostly psycho-analytical and sociological conclusions in the end), and Bordwell is nowhere as boring as I make him sound.
I think Bordwell's approach at looking at form first and foremost is basic film-watching 101 (meaning everyone should do that, and do that intensly), and everything else comes after and from that. But of course there's so much more to film history and to movies, that one needn't look at films "closely" if one is totally interested in other things.

[RenaultR]

Just out of curiosity, why does Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian inspire so much hatred, to the extent James Gray even called him "corrupt"? Sure, he's a critic for a mainstream outlet with a sensibility that's not terribly fresh or adventurous, but others like A.O. Scott, Anthony Lane, Peter Travers, and even Andrew O'Hehir don't seem to infuriate people to the same degree. Any reasons why?

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I don't know, but I will say that A.O. Scott infuriates me to no end. His review of Tsai's Stray Dogs is a particularly abhorrent example of critical malpractice. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/movi ... ation.html

A few of my favorite bits:

And “Stray Dogs,” with its glacial pace and disconnected narrative, often feels more like an art installation than like a movie.

Ah yes... the classic "not a movie" line. "Movie" here, of course, meaning narrative cinema which is adherent to the consecrated forms.

The point of no return in “Stray Dogs,” Tsai Ming-liang’s glum, humorless exercise in Asian miserablism, is an 11-minute scene of a homeless man smothering and devouring a cabbage with a face painted on it.

The scene brings to mind the moment in “Gone With the Wind” when Scarlett O’Hara, half-starving, digs up a radish, bites into it, vomits and vows never to be hungry again. In a tiny fraction of the time it takes for Mr. Lee to finish off that cabbage, Vivien Leigh conveys the same desperation. But instead of lapsing into a despairing funk, she claws her way out of the abyss. Because Mr. Lee’s character has none of her gumption, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of contempt for his lachrymose self-pity.

We first get the apples/oranges comparison in which he chides Hsiao Kang for not being more like Scarlet O'Hara, and argues that his misery is less worthy of empathy because of his dissimilarity (to one of the most despicable characters in film history) but also (and more importantly) assumes that brevity is a primary virtue in cinematic form.

I try to go out of my way to pretend he's just three college freshman pretending to be a real critic, and not a single college freshman who went through Harvard because of nepotism and made a career out of film criticism because he happens to be related to Eli Wallach.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I heard Bazin was pretty skeptical of author theory but still let it be published at the Cahiers, i can't really find anymore information on it (or maybe i didn't look hard enough) but I though that was interesting.

Bazin outlines his reservations about auteurism and his editorial approach here: http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/la-pol ... azin.shtml
It's a pretty interesting article from a historical perspective, and also because he brings up some key concepts that would become the major points that Kael would later use to attack Sarris' ideas.

[RenaultR]

Fair enough. That is pretty egregious on A.O. Scott's part, even if I wasn't a massive fan of Stray Dogs. I like some of the other Tsai films I've seen though, such as Rebels of the Neon God.

[Pretentious Hipster]

Ben Lyons is the only one that matters