Anthony Lane facts for kids

Anthony Lane is a British journalist who was a film critic for The New Yorker magazine from 1993 to 2024.

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.

Lane recounts episodes from his life as a filmgoer; he writes that film "has revivified the Proustian principle that memory is not ours to command", adding: "It is generally agreed, for example, that the last Golden Age of cinema occurred in the mid-seventies—the epoch of The Godfather, Chinatown and McCabe and Ms. Miller. I feel privileged to have been there; unfortunately, I spent my pocket money on tickets for Zeppelin, Earthquake, and Rollercoaster (in Sensuround.) I realize that Chinatown is a great picture and that The Towering Inferno is dreck; but the sight of a weary, begrimed Steve McQueen is burned into my mind with a fierceness that Jack Nicholson, with his nicked nostril, can never match. I missed the Golden Age; catching up later was an education, but nothing I can do can bring it back."

Lane's style is often allusive. In a piece reviewing recent bestsellers, Lane, paraphrasing Kingsley Amis, writes that "the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics: all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive—books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all."

Professional recognition

Anthony Lane was awarded the 2001 National Magazine Award for Reviews & Criticism, for three of his New Yorker articles:

• The Maria Problem (14 February 2000), on The Sound of Music
• The Eye of the Land (13 March 2000), on the photographs of Walker Evans
• The Light Side of the Moon (10 April 2000), on photographs from the Apollo program

Lane has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards on a number of other occasions, but has never won one. The nominations include:

• 1996 award for Special Interest, for the article Look Back in Hunger (18 December), a humorous piece about cookbooks
• 2000 award for Reviews & Criticism, for the articles
  • The Man in the Mirror (9 August 1999), on André Gide
  • In Love with Fear (16 August 1999), on Alfred Hitchcock
  • Waugh in Pieces (4 October 1999), on Evelyn Waugh

Nicholas Lezard, reviewing Lane's collection Nobody's Perfect, wrote that "If the film is good art, or a delight, Lane will communicate precisely, concisely and illuminatingly the relevant merits; if the film sucks, he has some fun." Laura Miller, reviewing that collection in The New York Times, wrote that "Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting. Like his beloved Jane Austen, his style is infernally contagious." However, she expressed reservations about his use of puns. In 2008, Lane was named one of the top 30 critics in the world by More Intelligent Life, the web version of the lifestyle publication from The Economist. As of 2010, the movie review aggregation website Metacritic weighted Lane's movie reviews higher than any other critic's.

Personal life

Lane lived in Cambridge, England with his former partner, Allison Pearson, a British writer and columnist.