Anthony Lane

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The New Yorker
For 1,119 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 30% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 68% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Anthony Lane's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Amour
Lowest review score: 0 The Da Vinci Code
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 614 out of 1119
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 1119
  3. Negative: 62 out of 1119
1119 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Two of Us
    The revelation here is Chevallier—or, to quote the end credits, “Martine Chevallier of the Comédie Française”—as Mado. Watch her watching the people around her, after the languid strength of her body has failed. Some of them discuss her as if she were absent, or dead, but her sharp blue eyes, following the action, and almost filling the movie screen, show that her wits are intact. So is her force of will. She’s all there.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Love & Mercy
    You feel both moved and exhausted by the distance that Wilson has to travel, musically and emotionally, before reaching the shore. That makes it, I guess, a happy ending. But then, as one of the Beach Boys remarks, on listening to “Pet Sounds,” even the happy songs are sad.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    What sets this film apart is its fusing of the impassioned and the grimly palpable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    A War
    The movie is memorable and draining, but “Full Metal Jacket” it is not.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Dinner Game
    No one could claim that the film is a distinguished contribution to cinema, but it would be churlish to resist its geniality and speed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    In the House
    It seems not just against the odds but against the laws of nature that a film as bookish, as suburban, and as self-consciously clever as In the House should also be such fun.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Ferrari
    The screenplay is by Troy Kennedy Martin, who died in 2009. It features the trusty components of a Mann movie: the smooth mechanics of professional labor, plus—or, more often, versus—the exhaust manifold of men’s emotional lives.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Crime Is Mine
    The movie is one of those pointed and prickly farces, like “8 Women” (2002) and “Potiche” (2011), that Ozon tends to scatter among his more solemn projects, as if to keep his comic hand in. The dramatis personae are boldly drawn and, let us say, broadly performed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Cars
    If Cars is something of a letdown, that is not because of the moral messages that it delivers but because of the heavy hand with which it cranks them out.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Cinderella
    Indeed, there is barely a frame of Branagh’s film that would cause Uncle Walt to finger his mustache with disquiet.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Jones is as formidable as ever, and Vincent D’Onofrio gives a sombre and riveting portrayal of Jerry Falwell, the Baptist Savonarola, who doesn’t hesitate to scythe down the Bakkers for their sins. But this is Chastain’s movie, through and through.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Edukators
    There is certainly a trill of suspense to be had from these ideological heists, but Weingartner’s movie is never quite as keen-edged as it hopes or needs to be.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Good Boss
    The Good Boss pulls more weight than you’d expect, and Bardem is in charge of the pulling. Here is one of his most packed performances—often funny, yet never engineered for laughs alone, and persuasive in its portrait of an essentially weak soul who persists in dreaming of strength.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    It Follows
    I happen to prefer the extreme unslackness of “Halloween,” and the resourceful pluck of Curtis, to the dreamier dread of Maika Monroe. Nonetheless, like her pursuers, It Follows won’t leave you alone.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Constant Gardener
    Think about it a day later, though, and its hectic swoop from romance to thriller to campaign manifesto leaves oddly little afterglow. The gardener is the only constant here; so much else burns up and blows away.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Quiet Girl
    Finely framed by the cinematographer Kate McCullough, The Quiet Girl is an idyll, yet its placid surface is puckered by anxiety.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    A Fantastic Woman
    Now and then, Lelio departs into reverie and daydream, and it’s here, loosening the bonds of his naturalistic style, that he draws us closer to the mystery of Marina.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    A Bigger Splash
    A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Fall of the American Empire
    The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Deep Water
    Toward the end, Deep Water grows less ambiguous and more conventional, but the rest of it is actually well suited to Lyne’s fetishistic style, with its succulent closeups, and the bitter memory of Glenn Close’s character—depicted as a vengeful virago—in Fatal Attraction is somewhat eased by de Armas’s willful and cheerful Melinda.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Slumdog Millionaire
    What IS surprising is the unembarrassed energy that Boyle devotes to his pursuit of the obvious; there’s nothing wrong with the formulaic, it would appear, so long as you bring the formula to the boil.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Suspiria
    The first time I saw Guadagnino’s Suspiria, I came out pretty much covered in gore, and confounded by the surfeit of stories. Can a splash be so big that it drowns the senses? How does such a film cohere? The second time around, I followed the flow, and found that what it led to was not terror, or disgust, but an unexpected sadness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    White God
    Yet the great thing about White God is that the more you command it to sit and stay — to settle down as a plausible plot, or to cohere as a political fable — the more it slips its leash and runs amok.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy, with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Mother
    The fact that Mother keeps its balance is a tribute to the leading actress.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Jerichow
    So compact and controlled is this fine film.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Julieta
    Almodóvar - whose penchant for narrative complexity grows ever deeper - latches on to the idea of personal history as a puzzle that refuses to be solved.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    They give excellent value for money, launching into song the way that normal folk go to the bathroom--regularly, politely, and because, if they didn't, well, darn it, they might just burst.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Anthony Lane
    Poor Things
    Only very rarely is it not fun.
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