British journalist Anthony Lane has been a film reviewer for The New Yorker magazine since 1993. "I'm not a creative writer," he once told an interviewer. "I don't write poetry or novels or drama but criticism, which is the eunuch of the family." In 2001 he received a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism, and in 2002 he published Nobody's Perfect: Writings From The New Yorker (Knopf in the US; Picador in the UK).
In this passage from a review of the film The White Ribbon (2009), Lane compares two kinds of movies: those that merely entertain and those that encourage thoughtful discussion.
Two Kinds of Movies
From "Happy Haneke"* by Anthony Lane
As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six o’clock films and nine o’clock films. Most movies are nine o’clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed--alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw onscreen. A six o’clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You’re going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie--the impact and the substance of it--back and forth. So Persona is a six o’clock movie, though it won’t leave you with much of an appetite. As is The Deer Hunter, whereas Platoon, for all its sound and fury, works fine for nine o’clock. The Reader is a nine o’clock movie that thinks it’s a six o’clock. Groundhog Day is the opposite. And The White Ribbon? A six-o'clock movie, if ever I saw one.
*"Happy Haneke" by Anthony Lane was published in the October 5, 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine.
