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“Somebody asked me, ‘When you write a pan of a movie, are you recommending that I not see it?’ ” the film critic Richard Brody recalled. “I said, ‘No, I’m recommending that you not enjoy it.’ ” Since the early years of the magazine, The New Yorker has published reviews both biting and effusive, with much in between. Brody and his colleague in film criticism Justin Chang engage in a wide-ranging conversation about the theory and practice of film criticism, including how the writers became critics, how they choose which movies to review, how they think about a rave versus a pan, and which reviews they regret. The discussion is moderated by the senior editor Leo Carey, who edits both Brody and Chang at the magazine.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999 and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Wes Anderson. In 2005, he became the movie-listings editor at the magazine, and is now a staff writer. He writes film reviews and an online column about movies. He is the author of the book “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard,” and is at work on a book about the lasting influence of the French New Wave.
Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. He also reviews movies for NPR’s program “Fresh Air.” Previously, he was the film critic at the Los Angeles Times and the chief film critic at Variety. His book “FilmCraft: Editing” was published in 2011. Chang serves as the chair of the National Society of Film Critics and the secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and is a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee. He teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. In 2024, he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, for his writing at the Los Angeles Times.
Leo Carey is a senior editor at The New Yorker, where he has spent his whole career, after starting out as an assistant. He was born in Oxford, England, and studied English literature at the university there. As an editor, he has worked on profiles, memoir, reportage, and book and film criticism. His own writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in Brooklyn and, in his spare time, plays the piano.
This seminar was filmed live at the 2024 New Yorker Festival.
Sourse: newyorker.com
