Anthony Lane is a British journalist who is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.
Career
Education and early career
Lane attended Sherborne School, graduating with a degree in English from Trinity College, Cambridge where he also did graduate work on T. S. Eliot. After graduation, he worked as a freelance writer and book reviewer for The Independent, where he was appointed deputy literary editor in 1989. In 1991, Lane was appointed film critic for The Independent on Sunday.
The New Yorker
In 1993, Lane was asked by The New Yorker's then-editor, Tina Brown, to join the magazine as a film critic. He has written profiles of actors and directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Grace Kelly) and authors (Ian Fleming and Patrick Leigh Fermor) and Hergé's Tintin books. Lane has also reviewed books, such as The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, two authors he reveres. In 2022, he wrote an essay on the legacy of Eliot's The Waste Land for its centenary. He contributes to the magazine's "Critic at Large" section; in 1999, he wrote about "The Endurance": Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition at the American Museum of Natural History, and in 2000 he wrote about Full Moon, a collection of lunar photographs at the Rose Center For Earth and Space.
A collection of 140 of his The New Yorker reviews, essays, and profiles was published in 2002 under the title Nobody's Perfect — a reference to the final line of the 1959 film Some Like It Hot. A profile of the film's director, Billy Wilder, ends the book.
Style
Lane's maxims
In his introduction to Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, Lane mentions five maxims that "should be obeyed by anyone who, having tried and failed to gain respectable employment, has decided to throw in the sponge and become a movie critic instead":
1) Never read the publicity material. 2) Whenever possible, see a film in the company of ordinary human beings. 3) Try to keep up with documentaries about Swabian transsexuals { or, see everything regardless of budget and hype}. 4) Whenever possible, pass sentence on a movie the day after it comes out. Otherwise, wait fifty years. 5) Try to avoid the Lane technique of summer moviegoing.
The explanation for the fifth maxim is a good example of Lane's style:
On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily – which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films – I started taking notes. These went "v. gloomy", "odd noir look for sci-fi", "creepy shadows in outdoor scene", and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did I remember to remove my dark glasses. Lane varies his style based on his subject. His review of The Prince of Egypt begins with the movie's slogan: "The power is real. The story is forever. The time is now." and continues in a parody of its clipped style: "The time is then. The place is Egypt. The boy is born. The prognostication is dodgy. The answer is bulrushes. The boy is launched. The boy is found. The adoption process is unimpeded by interference from government agencies. The dad is Pharaoh. The brother is Rameses. The stage is set." He goes on: "The picture is O. K. The picture is fine.. Look. The thing is this. The cutting-edge computer-generated imagery is white-hot new. The movie is old-fashioned. The story is forever. The movie is for the holidays. The choice is yours." His review of Emma and Kingpin imagines the characters from the former movie discussing the latter: "The company was far from disinclined to hear more; and Mr. Elton, whose refinement of expression was complemented by a most unsullied cordiality, spoke to them of bowling with ten pins; of the misfortune that was visited upon Mr. Harrelson in the losing of his arm; and of the ardent and uncouth intentions on the part of Mr. William Murray to impede the happiness that was both prized and merited by the heroes of the piece." Referring to the poor use of archaisms in Roland Joffé's The Scarlet Letter, he writes "Thou hast to be kidding." His review of The Phantom Menace mentions that "the worst marketing ploy I have seen so far is the Star Wars Learning Fun Book, for kids of kindergarten age. ('What is this? It is a Hutt. Say it out loud: Hutt.') The Phantom Menace raises the spectre of an industry where the parasitic arts of buildup and spinoff will outgrow and choke the product itself." Lane concludes: "What is this? Crap. Say it loud: Crap."