I wait for movies to release so that I can read her reviews," said Quentin Tarantino about the famous The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. Among the living critics here are a few whom I worship the way QT reveres Kael.
Financial Times movie critic Nigel Andrews is the absolute best, in my opinion. Calling Andrews a movie critic is a bit like calling Arnold Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder. He brings charm, mischief, provocation and astringent wit to his reviews that I don't see in any other critic of the current times. He manages to explain the plot, the idiosyncrasies of the film maker, bring out his artistic sensibilities - all within 400 words. He writes four such reviews every week. He's constitutionally incapable of writing a lazy sentence. He's eminently quotable and knows about art and literature as much as about movies and makes the connections that open a landscape you never knew could exist.
One ought to read his dispatches from film festivals the way one would pore over a Proust. Here's a sentence from his review of the recently released The Neon Demon: "I'm an amoral film critic. I carry in my mind only Jean Cocteau's dictum, that the thing that matters in cinema is 'Etonnez-nous! (surprise us)'".
New York-based critic Armond White is another writer who taught me that everything personal is political and that a movie is to be watched through those glasses. Unlike Andrews, White goes down the rabbit hole of history to place a piece of cinema in a political perspective, even for something as lowbrow as anything with Adam Sandler in it. White is considered to be a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian - a charge I would refute from the bottom of my heart. He was banned from Rotten Tomatoes, a critic aggregator site that gives ratings, after his review of The Dark Knight Returns spoiled the perfect 100 per cent rating the movie would have otherwise enjoyed.
He could have easily been a critic at The New York Times or The New Yorker but he knew his sensibilities would be curbed and his politics reined in. He was never part of the corporate media establishment and that's why he's able to give the critics' darlings a proper disembowelment. His criticism would have the erudition of a professor and the swagger of a Bukowski or Hunter S Thompson. I feel brainy when I read his reviews, something I would otherwise say only when reading people like W G Sebald or Walter Benjamin.
The New Yorker's Anthony Lane would make me laugh out loud with his turn of phrase that seems straight out of a David Sedaris book. He's one of those mainstream critics I enjoy immensely. He relishes American indie cinema but he doesn't get snooty about a superhero movie as well. While White would look at the hidden corners, Lane rarely goes beneath the surface, which has its own allure. I admire him for writing hilarious reviews without getting bogged down by the most awful plot of writing a review - explaining the plot without giving things away.
A few other critics I like are The Spectator's Deborah Ross for the way she melds her personal life into the movie reviews, Richard Brody for his avuncular strain of cinephilia and Jonathan Rosenbaum for discovering the forgotten gems. If I could I would physically implore you to check out the movie-related reading links on the blog of Girish Shambu, an associate professor of management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and co-editor of the film journal LOLA. He introduced me to a bunch of academic movie journals and online movie critics that I wouldn't have known otherwise in a thousand years.
Among Indian critics, The Hindu's Baradwaj Rangan rocks my world. He's quite possibly the only Indian movie critic who writes so well about Tamil cinema, something that rarely gets written about in mainstream Indian media. He writes with an infectious zeal that makes the reader ponder and watch the movie again.
By the way, here's why I took a break from reviewing cinema and decided to throw names at you. Film maker Scott Derrickson recently tweeted this: "If you look at Rotten Tomatoes scores w/o reading selected reviewers that you respect, you're doing it wrong. You and cinema deserve better."
