To bad, if true. The Times's loss. As much as I enjoy A.O. Scott, Elvis is quite the knowledgable guy. Wherever he winds up will be lucky to have him. (I'd like to see him and Anthony Lane alternating at The New Yorker, but I have a feeling that Denby isn't going anywhere).

Yeah, I was one of the people who were highly dubious when Scott was named to the post out of nowhere, because he really hadn't written much about film. But he's turned out quite well. Still, Elvis is the real deal, with a depth of background Scott can't approach. Here's hoping they get someone in there with that sort of film knowledge.

(Hi, Todd!)

You know what would be great? Get a film department including Elvis, Andy, and that guy from New York Magazine -- Peter Rainer. That would be some review staff, wouldn't it?

Oh -- wait...

(You could throw in Joe Morgenstern, too)

Yeah, except Joe is the guy who's already got a job as good or better.

The best longform critic in North America works out of a home office in London, England (Anthony Lane). Long ago, Jay Scott of the Globe and Mail in Toronto was arguably the master. This is a chance for the NYT to make a bold move and cultivate some fresh talent or formats. For example, how about getting screenwriter Paul Rudnick to review the upcoming Stepford Wives under his nom de plumme, Libby Gelman-Waxner?

I thought Lane was located in New York. Interesting. Lane is of course one of the six other people in the known universe to whom the New York Times would represent a step down. I've never heard anyone make such an emphatic claim about Scott -- better than John Powers or Pete Rainer or Manohla Dargis or J. Hoberman? -- but I'm only passingly familiar with his work.

I'm not sure what you mean in this case by "longform" critic: I sure don't think of the New York Times reviews as "longform."

Rudnick is a genius, and the Libby columns were great; having him do Stepford would be a great joke, but exactly the sort of joke I'd be surprised to see at the Times. And it would only be a one-shot: that would be beyond a "fresh format" and only as a supplement to the real review by a disinterested party.

The hiring of Scott was considered at the time "cultivating fresh talent." I don't think you can expect anything bolder from the Times.

Am I the only person who's thrilled that Mitchell has departed the Times? His reviews were filled with endless pop culture references ("Ms. Coppola is the Brittany Spears of indie films," stuff like that) and thudding, snide jokes. And they were long winded and overwritten; most of them would have been better at two thirds or even half the length. The ability to convey the SENSE of a film, it's texture, rhythms, and feel, completely eluded the self-aggrandizing Mitchell. He was too busy showing off his alleged writing skills by doing figure 8s on the corpse of the film he was eviscerating.

His colleague Stephen Holden can write a snappy, incisive review, as can Todd McCarthy in Variety. When you get to the "critic" level, you're left with only David Denby at the New Yorker. I'm not a fan of Anthony Lane, whose learned condescencion comes from the same slop bucket as Mitchell's, only with an English accent and superior writing skills.

Mitchell's (undeserved, in my opinion) reputation may stem from the fact that there are so few decent film reviewers these days. But then, there are so few decent movies as well. One may breed the other.

In any case, I'm delighted I won't have to trudge through another 2,000 snide, pop-oriented Mitchell mots (when a swift 1,000 would have done the job) any longer. I just shudder to think where he may wind up.

At the risk of being accused of professional jealousy, I wholeheartedly agree with you, John, on both Mitchell and Lane. I disagree that there are few decent movies these days, but grant that many of them may not be playing at theaters immediately near you.

Now, Andy Klein and Peter Rainer at the NYT -- That would be refreshing, and therefore highly unlikely.

As much as I enjoy Lane's writing (I don't pay much attention to any reviewer's opinions: I want to know what the movie is like, not what they think of it) is that he once let fly an enormous spoiler, the death of a fairly major character, simply so he could make a pun. Spoilers are (1) unforgivable and (2) the sign of a writer to lazy to avoid them and an editor too contemptuous of the readers to let them through,

In case anybody else missed the earlier joke: for a while Elvis, Andy, and Rainer were all writing about film for the Her-Ex; and Morgenstern (for several years, now, reviewing movies for the WSJ) was in another corner of the same building.

Thanks you, Luke, though obviously I disagree about Lane and Mitchell. I've worked with Rainer at two different outlets now, and one of the reasons we make a good team is that our interests and styles (and sometimes our tastes) are so complementary.

If we're going to distinguish between the "critic" level and (I assume) the "reviewer" level, John, there are the issues of the purpose, frequency, and space considerations of the publication. The goals of release-date reviews and longer-form criticism overlap...but not all that much. I tend to think of Powers, Dargis, Rosenbaum, and Rainer (just off the top of my head and not meant to be comprehensive) as being matches for anybody out there, not excluding Denby. But the New Yorker is an outlet with a certain tradition, a hugely variable length envelope, and less of a concern with release date timeliness than most.

Even the strongest stylists adjust to their outlets and audiences. Dargis could go into greater depth at the Weekly than at the Times. She could go into even greater depth at the New Yorker, were she there. (Way back when, Michael Wilmington's transition from the Weekly to the Times was, I think, an even bigger change.)

I have much greater freedom at CityBeat than I had at New Times, except for one thing: my lead review *has* to be between 1200 and 1300 words; we don't do jump, so there's very little flexibility there. On, say, Passion, Dogville, and Kill Bill, I spend half as much time trimming as I spent writing; if there's nothing halfway interesting that week, I'm either expanding the piece with more historical context than the film deserves or trying to figure out how to bind two films together.

The New York Times, ca. 1965 or so, had a long tradition of utterly uninteresting, not especially well-informed critics, who felt like they had come to the job from some other, "more important" desk at the paper. The best reaction one could have to Bosley Crowther was "Big fuckin' deal"; the worst was "Whose idea of a film critic is this guy?" Canby and Maslin was marginal improvements; Mitchell and Scott substantially better.

Oy. Typo on the first word of the above post.

Andy, what the majority of film reviewers lack is style, the ability to convey their opinions in cool, lucid, sparkling prose. Please note that I haven't quarrelled with any of Mitchell's opinions; it's his gaseous, snide expression of them that drove me round the bend. Dargis is a shrewd, well informed filmgoer, but she often lapses into stridency and liberal agit-prop. Powers is pedantic and a bit of a snob. Rainer is the bigget snob of them all. You feel in their prose that they are deigning to go to the movies and be tortured, tortured by all these bad films.

Most of these reviewers -- they can arguably be called critics -- are the sons and daughters of Pauline Kael. But Pauline Kael could write like a dream, at least until the last decade of her work. So what if she hated Fellini; it was invigorating to read her bristling prose and debate in your head with her. I don't think anyone would say the same of Powers, Rainer, or even Dargis. Their prose is often fatuous and condescending (Powers, Rainer) of sometime just plain ponderous (Dargis).

I'm bemused that you would knock Vincent Canby, who I felt was a model reviewer, capable of turning out a few hundred witty, well thought out words that let the reader know what the film was like and his opinion of it. Few people today can match him. The art of writing a decent review is a challenging one; Canby could do it, so could Walter Kerr and Frank Rich (for theatre). Today, as I noted above, we have Stephen Holden and Todd McCarthy.

A lot of what gets published in the film section of the newspapers is simply someone's opinion, padded out with plot synopsis points cribbed from the production notes, with an occassional wisecrack thrown in. The vigor, the briskness of a Canby or Kael is completely missing. And, as a side note, for the intellectually twee, like Dargis, no one has ever matched Renata Adler, whose one year tenure at the NY Times can be read in "A Year in the Dark." Adler, a brilliant stylist, pulled off what Mitchell has been trying to do his entire career: dancing on the head of a pin -- in this case, a bad, irrelevant movie -- and never falling off.

Interesting to see what people value in a review. Personally, my favorite reviewers are the ones who manage to convey to me the notion that the writer is a real person reacting to the movie from their gut, rather than trying to impress with their prose, or liking and disliking things they seem to think they're "supposed" to -- knee-jerk trashing of big-budget summer movies, for example. Even if they're terrible with words (Harry Knowles, for example), I appreciate the degree to which a reviewer can convey their individual reaction as a human being, rather than assuming an "objective" pose that comes off as arrogant.

I read right-wing Christian reviews for the same reason.

Andy, regarding Anthony Lane, do you recall his review of Crouching Tiger, perchance? It was as if he'd never seen a HK action flick before.

I love Elvis but this is pretty damned funny:

I *said*:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/indiewendy/archives/000267.html