Anthony Lane facts for kids

Anthony Lane is a British journalist who is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.

Career

Education and early career

Lane attended Sherborne School, graduating with a degree in English from Trinity College, Cambridge where he also did graduate work on T. S. Eliot. After graduation, he worked as a freelance writer and book reviewer for The Independent, where he was appointed deputy literary editor in 1989. In 1991, Lane was appointed film critic for The Independent on Sunday.

The New Yorker

In 1993, Lane was asked by The New Yorker's then-editor, Tina Brown, to join the magazine as a film critic. He has written profiles of actors and directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Grace Kelly) and authors (Ian Fleming and Patrick Leigh Fermor) and Hergé's Tintin books. Lane has also reviewed books, such as The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, two authors he reveres. In 2022, he wrote an essay on the legacy of Eliot's The Waste Land for its centenary. He contributes to the magazine's "Critic at Large" section; in 1999, he wrote about "The Endurance": Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition at the American Museum of Natural History, and in 2000 he wrote about Full Moon, a collection of lunar photographs at the Rose Center For Earth and Space.

A collection of 140 of his The New Yorker reviews, essays, and profiles was published in 2002 under the title Nobody's Perfect — a reference to the final line of the 1959 film Some Like It Hot. A profile of the film's director, Billy Wilder, ends the book.

Professional recognition

Anthony Lane was awarded the 2001 National Magazine Award for Reviews & Criticism, for three of his New Yorker articles:

• The Maria Problem (14 February 2000), on The Sound of Music
• The Eye of the Land (13 March 2000), on the photographs of Walker Evans
• The Light Side of the Moon (10 April 2000), on photographs from the Apollo program

Lane has also been nominated for National Magazine Awards on a number of other occasions, but has never won one. The nominations include:

• 1996 award for Special Interest, for the article Look Back in Hunger (18 December), a humorous piece about cookbooks
• 2000 award for Reviews & Criticism, for the articles
  • The Man in the Mirror (9 August 1999), on André Gide
  • In Love with Fear (16 August 1999), on Alfred Hitchcock
  • Waugh in Pieces (4 October 1999), on Evelyn Waugh

Laura Miller, reviewing that collection in The New York Times, wrote that "Lane writes pose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting. Like his beloved Jane Austen, his style is infernally contagious." However, she expressed reservations about his use of puns. In 2008, Lane was named one of the top 30 critics in the world by More Intelligent Life, the web version of the lifestyle publication from The Economist. As of 2010, the movie review aggregation website Metacritic weighted Lane's movie reviews higher than any other critic's.

Personal life

Lane lives in Cambridge, England with his wife, Allison Pearson, a British writer and columnist. The couple have a daughter, Eveline (born January 1996), and a son, Thomas B. (born August 1998).