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. He is well-known for his clever and often humorous way of writing about movies.

His Career as a Critic

Starting Out

Anthony Lane went to Sherborne School and then studied English at Trinity College, Cambridge. After college, he started working as a writer and reviewer for different newspapers. In 1989, he became the deputy literary editor for The Independent. By 1991, he was writing movie reviews for The Independent on Sunday.

Writing for The New Yorker

In 1993, the editor of The New Yorker magazine, Tina Brown, asked Anthony Lane to join their team as a film critic. He wrote about many different things for the magazine. He created profiles of famous actors and directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly. He also wrote about authors like Ian Fleming and even the Tintin comic books.

Lane also reviewed many books, especially those by authors he admired, such as The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. In 2002, a collection of 140 of his best reviews and essays from The New Yorker was published. It was called Nobody's Perfect. This title is a famous line from the movie Some Like It Hot, which he wrote about.

His Unique Writing Style

Lane's Tips for Critics

In his book Nobody's Perfect, Anthony Lane shared some fun tips for anyone thinking about becoming a movie critic. He called them "maxims," which are like rules or guiding ideas. Here are a few:

• Never read the movie's publicity material.
• Always try to watch a movie with other people.
• Watch all kinds of movies, no matter how big or small they are.
• Try to write your review the day after the movie comes out, or wait 50 years!
• Try to avoid his own "summer moviegoing" technique.

Lane also shared stories about his own experiences watching movies. He mentioned how some movies from his childhood, even if they weren't considered "great," are still very clear in his memory. For example, he saw movies like Zeppelin and Earthquake when he was young. Even though movies like Chinatown are considered classics, the images from the movies he saw as a kid stuck with him more.

His writing style often includes many references to other books or ideas. He once wrote that the best things to read are either "trash" (easy, fun books) or "classics" (important books that make you think).

Awards and Recognition

Anthony Lane has received several awards and nominations for his writing.

Awards Won

In 2001, he won the National Magazine Award for Reviews & Criticism. This award was for three of his articles in The New Yorker:

• The Maria Problem (about The Sound of Music)
• The Eye of the Land (about photographs by Walker Evans)
• The Light Side of the Moon (about photos from the Apollo program)

Nominations

He was also nominated for the National Magazine Award on other occasions, including:

• In 1996, for a funny article about cookbooks called Look Back in Hunger.
• In 2000, for articles about André Gide, Alfred Hitchcock, and Evelyn Waugh.

Many people have praised Anthony Lane's writing. Critic Nicholas Lezard said that Lane can clearly explain why a good film is great, and if a film is bad, he still makes it fun to read about. Laura Miller from The New York Times compared his writing to Fred Astaire's dancing, saying his sentences have a wonderful rhythm. In 2008, he was named one of the top 30 critics in the world by More Intelligent Life. Also, the website Metacritic, which gathers movie reviews, rated Lane's reviews very highly.

Personal Life

Anthony Lane used to live in Cambridge, England, with his former partner, Allison Pearson, who is also a British writer.

See Also

• Film criticism
• The New Yorker