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Anthony Lane
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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El Conde (2023) |
Few jokes, no matter how sick and strong, can be told over and over without beginning to fade. - New Yorker
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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A Haunting in Venice (2023) |
Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade. - New Yorker
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| Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Fremont (2023) |
The story is suffused with an uncommon blend of radiance and resignation, nowhere more rapturously than in the final shot. - New Yorker
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| Posted Aug 18, 2023
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Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story (2023) |
The overarching irony of the tale is that, true though it may be, it never feels quite real; the more that Jann exceeds what is foretold of him, the farther he accelerates into a mere simulation of a plausible narrative. - New Yorker
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| Posted Aug 18, 2023
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Lady Killer (1937) |
“Lady Killer” strikes me as the real deal. - New Yorker
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Passages (2023) |
“Passages,” far from being an elegant love triangle, is more like a quadrilateral of desire. And the shape of it shifts, right up to the bitter end. - New Yorker
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| Posted Aug 04, 2023
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The Age of Innocence (1993) |
Life in the New York of the eighteen-seventies may have been constrained, but it was never dull—not if Scorsese’s camera is anything to go by. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 24, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023) |
Relentlessness of this order ought to be chilling. Not so. Instead, we are stirred and amused by a preternatural sight: men as little machines. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 14, 2023
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Mulholland Dr. (2001) |
This film is a record of a journey, and it leaves us with the dreadful possibility that all highways are lost. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 10, 2023
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Y tu mamá también (2001) |
Cuarón’s style is so open and relaxed, and his actors are so attuned to one another, that not until the final scene... do we see that what felt life-affirming has also been a meditation on the slide of time, and on the offstage presence of death. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 05, 2023
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Biosphere (2022) |
Biosphere, though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 01, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
If you really want to rove back and forth through time, you don’t need the Antikythera at all. Forget the myth. Screw Archimedes. All you need is the movies. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jul 01, 2023
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Maggie Moore(s) (2023) |
What Slattery conjures... for some reason, is a continual sourness and decay, which gets into every crevice of the action... - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 16, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
Even if you regard the latest movie as a box of tricks, you have to admire the nerve with which Johansson, as Midge, delves into that box and plucks out scraps of coolly agonized wit. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 16, 2023
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To Die For (1995) |
The film, adapted by Buck Henry from Joyce Maynard’s novel, is smartly structured, but Van Sant’s touch is uncertain: the story’s satirical bite begins to loosen as his camera lingers more and more on the disaffected teen-agers. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 12, 2023
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Stranger Than Fiction (2006) |
The ending may be mush, but the rest has surprising bite. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 05, 2023
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SLC Punk (1999) |
A messy but engaging look at the punk scene in Salt Lake City during the Reagan years; that may sound a little specialized, but how many of us knew there ever was a punk scene—or even a single punk—in the home of the Mormons? - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 05, 2023
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Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) (2022) |
Corbijn has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail-crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
The film hits home. In part, that is a tribute to its melancholy. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Master Gardener (2022) |
It’s almost as if the movie were following the blueprint of a moral scheme, like the layout of a herbaceous border, and plausibility be damned. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 19, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
Well, this setup might possibly furnish a single episode of “Seinfeld.” Whether it’s enough to sustain a whole movie is another matter. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 19, 2023
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Muriel's Wedding (1994) |
The two fine, edgy performances by Collette and Griffiths keep things afloat. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 15, 2023
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Chile '76 (2022) |
It’s a hell of a performance from Küppenheim as the heroine, precisely because she demonstrates how hard it is to be heroic. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 05, 2023
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BlackBerry (2023) |
One can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too. - New Yorker
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| Posted May 05, 2023
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Jimmy Hollywood (1994) |
The movie goes on too long, and the ending is milked too heavily for irony, but it makes you sit up and watch—it’s serious fun. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 24, 2023
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Everything Went Fine (2021) |
In truth, every performance in “Everything Went Fine” is nicely judged—too much so, I suspect, for many filmgoers, who will be praying for someone to explode. Yet the movie is anything but bland. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
Does Aster think we’re too slow, or too dumb, to pick up hints as we go? Some viewers will revel in such excess; I found it ever more wearisome... - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Paint (2023) |
Maybe all the characters are stoned. That would explain a lot. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 05, 2023
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Air (2023) |
This movie, in short, kneels at the altar of high capitalism. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 05, 2023
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The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) |
The film feels warm but unsettled, as if hinting at approaching storms; the score, too, flits from lugubrious to manic. - New Yorker
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| Posted Apr 03, 2023
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Acidman (2022) |
This film is what would remain if you deleted all the spaceships from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”: the tale of a once ordinary man beset by an unworldly thirst that he can neither explain nor quench. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 31, 2023
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Joyland (2022) |
Sadiq is not lecturing us or trading in types; he is taking us by sensory surprise, and the tale that he tells is funny, forward, and sometimes woundingly sad. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 31, 2023
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What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? (2023) |
More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 17, 2023
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Inside (2023) |
Life, in the hands of Dafoe, is an agonized game. For Katsoupis, regrettably, agony wins the day. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 17, 2023
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Strange Days (1995) |
Fiennes holds steady; his moody, lonely performance, especially in the beguiling first half hour, lends the story an air of calm despair. - New Yorker
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| Posted Mar 10, 2023
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The Quiet Girl (2022) |
Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, “The Quiet Girl” is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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Cocaine Bear (2023) |
The excess, however gleeful, is that of a film paying anxious tribute to itself. Look, it seems to shout, here’s an apex predator becoming a homicidal junkie! What did you expect? - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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The Station Agent (2003) |
None of the central performers put a foot wrong; Dinklage excels as a burdened man who is angry, tired, and tough. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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The Tailor of Panama (2001) |
Boorman wants to turn the novel’s rueful satire into something sharp and sweaty, but the tone veers all over the place, and the plot feels like reckless fantasy. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 07, 2023
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Godland (2022) |
One secret of this extraordinary film, and of its power to exhilarate: the shock of emotional vigor, arising from the continual rub of physical texture and effort. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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Knock at the Cabin (2023) |
For some reason, the movie doesn’t cling and stick as it should. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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You People (2023) |
The one person to emerge with credit from the melee is Murphy, whose character grows ever more rigid with anger. Supporting actors as forceful as Rhea Perlman and Elliott Gould barely get a chance to speak. - New Yorker
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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Close (2022) |
What Dhont understands, in short, is how kinetic the rites of passage are—how growing pains are expressed not in words, however therapeutic, but in rushes of activity. - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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When You Finish Saving the World (2022) |
Although “When You Finish Saving the World” is... taut with unhappiness, it allows itself to be funny... - New Yorker
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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Corsage (2022) |
What Kreutzer aims to impress upon us is the effect of smothering and constraint—not only upon her heroine but also upon the female sex, at every social stratum, under Habsburg rule. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 23, 2022
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Babylon (2022) |
It goes nowhere, in a mad rush. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 23, 2022
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The Truth About Charlie (2002) |
The film is hilariously indifferent to the conundrum of the plot, but it is sustained, just about, by the buoyancy of its mood. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 19, 2022
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Living (2022) |
So compelling are Nighy and Burke that I will watch them in anything... - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
The moral combat could not be more simplistic, yet all the Cameron trademarks are in play... - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) |
It seems fitting... that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. - New Yorker
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| Posted Dec 02, 2022
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