We’re giving out about stupid w*ke film critics inflating the worth of obscure art house crap while spilling Gitane ash down their pretentious black polo necks. Or maybe they’re now spilling kale smoothies on their Urban Outfitter cardies. Anyway, we’ve been complaining about that forever, but the conversation has taken on a particular pungency this year. You could blame my colleagues at the New York Times. It makes more sense to blame people who don’t grasp what a critic is for.
The annual top 10s from Manhola Dargis and AO Scott of that newspaper triggered louder gripes than usual on their publication a week or so ago. Space prohibits a complete listing, but Dargis headed her chart with Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and followed up with such cerebral releases as Jafar Panahi’s No Bears and Audrey Diwan’s Happening. Scott liked Jordan Peele’s Nope best, but also had time for Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions and Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet.
Geniuses leapt up almost immediately to boast about not having heard of anything on the list. The most common specific complaint was that neither critic had included Top Gun: Maverick. Almost as many objected to the non-appearance of Everything Everywhere All At Once. But the overarching outrage gathered around the critics’ arrogance in selecting films of which the man on the Staten Island omnibus may not be aware.
Events came to a head when (go on, guess who!) Elon Musk popped up on his newly acquired microblogging site to declare: “Top Gun Maverick was great! NYTimes has gone ‘full woke’". Jason Calacanis, internet entrepreneur and start-up investor, then convened an actual podcast to wonder whether AO Scott was “trolling with his top 10 list”.
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One hardly knows where to begin with this. There was great merriment in Irish Times Towers as Tara Brady and I recalled we had found room for neither Top Gun: Maverick nor Everything Everywhere All At Once anywhere in our top 50. (We did, however, put Prey, kinetic prequel to the Schwarzenegger flick Predator, in the top five. So the populist front can put down their pitchforks.) In less solipsistic form, we can look towards a typically sensible response from the amiable Guillermo del Toro. “Top tens are not all pageants,” the director of Pan’s Labyrinth wrote. “They (at best) declare versions of cinema that express self ... and they don’t close a door – they open ten.”
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Del Toro puts it well. One must grudgingly admit that the world would maybe – I said “maybe” – get along better without movie critics than it would without heart surgeons, nuclear physicists or the people who actually make films. But if such people have any value, it is to locate work that readers might not otherwise encounter. Top Gun: Maverick will do just fine without the support of pointy-headed boffins (though, as it happens, the notices were strong). Reviews still matter, however, when it comes to smaller films such as Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. That touching drama, starring Paul Mescal as a troubled Scot holidaying with his daughter in the 1990s, arrived at Critics Week at the Cannes film festival with little buzz. Reviewers turned it into a succès d’estime and it has since played across the world to great applause. That doesn’t mean it has registered with everyone. Aftersun was one of the films ridiculed on AO Scott’s list. Maybe one or two of those poking fun will have a look at it. One can hope.
This has pretty much always been the situation. While dissing Scott for not including Maverick, Calacanis nodded towards a legend of American criticism. “Where have you gone Roger Ebert, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” he quipped, in imitation of Paul Simon. But a quick check confirms that Ebert, as at home to the art house as the populist, gave an unimpressed two and a half stars to the original Top Gun in 1986. His top 10 for the Sight and Sound poll in 2012 included films by Werner Herzog, Yasujirô Ozu and Federico Fellini. The most admired critics have always looked beyond the mainstream.
Yet something has changed and it’s nothing to do with the supposed rise of the supposed woke. In an earlier era many of the most acclaimed films were also box office hits. Audiences have stopped turning out for contemporary equivalents of All The President’s Men and Taxi Driver. Studios stopped making them. If we go back to 1972, we find that – imagine this, now – one of the films in the New York Times’ top 10 became the highest-grossing ever. That film was The Godfather. Alongside the gangster flick we find ... well, Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon. So things haven’t changed that much. The black polo neck has always held sway. Quite right too.
