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Longtime new york times film critic a.o. scott moving to book review after the oscars.

The critic has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the newspaper over the last 23 years.

By Alex Weprin

Alex Weprin

Media & Business Writer

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The New York Times ‘ film critic A.O. Scott is moving to a new beat.

Scott, who has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the Times over the last 23 years, will shift to The New York Times Book Review where he will “write critical essays, notebooks and reviews that grapple with literature, ideas and intellectual life,” according to a memo to Times staff from Sam Sifton, Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel Tuesday.

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Scott will leave the culture section for the Book Review in March, after the Oscars and 2023 film awards season.

Scott joined the Times as a film critic in 2000 from Long Island’s Newsday and was elevated to co-chief film critic in 2004, alongside Manohla Dargis, who remains the chief film critic for the paper of record. A Times spokesperson said that the outlet will be hiring another film critic.

With its international profile and large cosmopolitan readership, being a critic for the Times (be it in books, film, TV, architecture, restaurants, etc) means that everything you write will be thoroughly scrutinized. That was true for Scott as well, whose 2012 dustup with Samuel L. Jackson over a review of Marvel’s The Avengers garnered substantial media coverage ( including from The Hollywood Reporter ).

The memo from Sifton, Michel and Cruz is below.

On January 1, 2000, A.O. Scott joined The Times as a film critic, after working as a Sunday book critic at New York Newsday. Eleven days later, we published his first review, of the comedy “My Dog Skip”: “a relaxed, modest evocation of the mythology of small-town mid-20th-century American childhood, with its lazy summers, its front porches and picket fences, and its fat-tired, chromed-plated bicycles.” Four years later, he was named co-chief film critic, alongside Manohla Dargis.

In many ways this is a natural progression. Tony was a literature concentrator at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987, and is a graduate-school dropout in American literature (Johns Hopkins: thank you, next!). He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate and, of course, to Newsday.

A deep and abiding interest in books and ideas has been clear in Tony’s work here from the start. “It’s the job of art to free our minds,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “Better Living Through Criticism,” “and it’s the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.” And anyone who read his towering series about American novelists for the Book Review a few years ago, “The Americans,” can see in his work a desire to take measure of more than simply a cultural product, but of the culture itself.

Please join us in congratulating Tony on starting this exciting new chapter in his remarkable career.

Sam, Gilbert and Sia

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Grand Appetites and “Poor Things”

One of the funniest things about Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is how unfunny it is. Who can stifle a snicker at the monster’s first chat with his creator? “Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due,” the brute exclaims. Say what? He’s meant to be made from the spare parts of dead guys, but he talks like Mr. Darcy. In a way, Shelley’s novel has to be humorless. (Don’t forget that she was still a teen-ager when she wrote it.) One prick of a joke and the grandeur of her tragic tale—the Alpine sublimity of it all—would go pop.

No such caution attends the new movie from Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things,” which is best approached as a rumbustious riff on Frankensteinian themes—or, in the pensive words of one character, “this diabolical fuckfest of a puzzle.” The creature at its core is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman who—for reasons that I shan’t reveal—comes under the care of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). “Her mental age and her body are not quite synchronized,” he says. Initially, Bella expresses herself in guttural blurts and wild linguistic lunges: “Bud,” she declares, having whacked a man on the nose and drawn blood. Lanthimos charts the gradual improvement in her synchronicity, as her understanding blossoms from the childlike into the mature. If that makes the film sound like no fun at all, don’t worry. Only very rarely is it not fun.

“Poor Things,” written by Tony McNamara, is based on a 1992 book of the same title by the Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, who died in 2019, and who didn’t so much spin yarns as weave them into complex—and magnificently unreliable—tapestries. He was a Glaswegian and a specifier, and on the page it is briskly stated that Baxter, a surgeon residing at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, first encounters Bella in February, 1881. Onscreen, matters are less precise. The city is unnamed, and, as for the period, my guess would be late-Victorian steampunk, tricked out with modernist gewgaws. When Bella goes to Portugal, we see trolleys arcing through the sky on wires, like neighborhood airships. Time, in short, is a jumble.

But then almost everyone here, and everything, is constructed from bits and pieces. Consider Godwin Baxter, whose face is a roughly cut jigsaw of flesh, and whose Scottish accent wavers like a candle. His home has an operating room and an unusual menagerie, including a bulldog with the back end of a goose. The dog’s rump is attached to the front of the bird, and the result trots happily along. Baxter’s carriage is a horse’s head melded onto a juddering steam engine. These living collages are his proud handiwork, and Bella is his masterpiece. He’s like Victor Frankenstein minus the tortured conscience—a hyper-rational product of Enlightenment truth-hunting, splendidly played by Dafoe with a fierce benevolence, and without a shred of silliness. After lecturing students in anatomy, he invites the most promising of them, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to be his assistant, and to document Bella’s progress.

Sadly, we miss out on the fabulous pun cluster with which, in Gray’s book, Bella greets Baxter and Max together: “Hell low God win, hell low new man.” It’s like the plot of “Paradise Lost,” boiled down to eight monosyllables. (The philosopher William Godwin was Mary Shelley’s father, and, in the movie, Bella often addresses Baxter simply as “God.” You getting all this?) In most respects, however, Lanthimos is loyal to Gray’s vision of Bella as much more than a scientific curiosity—as someone through whose eyes and on whose inquisitive tongue the world is forever being tested and tasted, as if it were freshly made. Bella doesn’t have bad manners; rather, when she bumps into the laws of social conduct, she forces us to reassess how rum they can be and to wonder why we bother with them at all. On board an ocean liner, Bella approaches a passenger and cries, “Hello, interesting older lady!,” patting the woman’s frizzy hair to gauge its texture.

The narrative thrust of the film is itself a joke, being a parody of Romantic melodrama, and relying on what Bella calls “a confluence of circumstances I regard as almost fate-like.” Although Max (a gentle man, if not quite a gentleman) is attracted to Bella, and proposes marriage, he is trumped by an incoming cad named Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo with a mustache, a calculating smirk, and a barrel-load of glee. Scooping up Bella, Duncan bears her off to foreign climes and schools her in mischief, only to be outsmarted by her fast-blooming intelligence. As she informs him, “my heart has become dim towards your swearing, weepy person.” Would that all relationships could be broken off with such forensic frankness. The action shifts to Lisbon, Alexandria, Paris, and finally back to British shores. There, in proper nineteenth-century fashion, a devilish twist awaits.

One of the funniest things about “Poor Things” is the headline that appeared in Variety after the film’s première at the Venice Film Festival, on September 1st: “Emma Stone’s Graphic ‘Poor Things’ Sex Scenes Make Venice Erupt in 8-Minute Standing Ovation.” Laying aside the giveaway verb—no eruptive dysfunction here —one can but marvel at the blush of puritan shockability in such a response. It’s a charming idea that the audience was stirred not by any dramatic skills on the part of the leading lady but exclusively by her valor as she dared to feign the gymnastic arts of love.

There is indeed a fair dollop of carnality in Lanthimos’s movie, but it’s hardly a torrent. “Furious jumping,” Bella calls it, in a fine example of her poetic plain speaking, and, having sampled it, she wants more. Sprawled in postcoital languor next to Duncan, she asks, “Why do people not do this all the time?,” an excellent question to which I, like Duncan, have no satisfactory reply. What matters most is that the sex, pace Variety , is not some isolated bout of friskiness; it takes its place in a larger comedy of appetites, as Bella hungers to steep herself in experience. If she dislikes a mouthful of food, she spits it out. When she dances, she jerks like a doll gone mad.

Lanthimos, one might say, has been here before. In his breakout work, “Dogtooth” (2009), two sisters gesticulated and shuffled in front of their parents as if obeying some absurdist ritual. And did Stone not display a Bella-like deadpan candor in “The Favourite” (2018), Lanthimos’s previous feature? Yes, but here she is more forthright still, pacing the metamorphosis of her character with warmth and wit. “The Favourite” felt arch and knowing, whereas “Poor Things” is about the act of knowing, and, much as Boris Karloff uncovered tenderness in horror, Stone takes a cautionary fable of the early machine age and crowns it with a generosity of spirit—aided, it must be said, by Holly Waddington’s sumptuous costume design. Check out Bella’s sleeves. They are not merely puffballs. They are explosions.

Can such dedication to excess become de trop ? Lanthimos and his cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, repeat the fish-eye-lens trick that they used in “The Favourite,” whereby landscapes and roomscapes bend and curve under our gaze. I often had the uncomfortable sensation that I was spying on “Poor Things” through a keyhole, like a prying butler. Although such visual contortions are a neat fit for the director’s elastic imaginings, one could argue that the basic conceit of the film is already so crazily swollen that there’s no need to pump it up any further. Mind you, Gray had a habit of adorning his own texts with gaily stylized illustrations, so maybe Lanthimos felt that he had a license to pump.

It’s no surprise, perhaps, that so brazen an attitude should fail when confronted with genuine suffering. In Alexandria, Bella catches sight of a huddle—the poor, the sick, and the starving—and realizes, as she has never done before, how cruel existence can be. The problem is that we barely see the huddle; it’s an indistinguishable mass, far away, at the foot of a slope. Such is the price that “Poor Things” must pay for its interrogative good cheer. “Tell me about myself. Was I nice?” Bella asks, and “Do you believe people improvable, Max?” That is the authentic voice of meliorism; William Godwin would have recognized it at once, and I like to picture his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley’s mother), sitting and staring, with eyes as wide as Emma Stone’s, at the audacity of “Poor Things,” and at the pure feminist logic that propels its heroine to insist on her rights, not least when she finds employment in a brothel. Lined up with other sex workers, to be picked out by the male customers, she says to her boss, “Would you not prefer it if the women chose?”

Given this quizzical air, it’s only natural that someone in the movie should expire—a rebuff to those of us who feared that deathbed scenes were dying out. The same goes for “Maestro,” but that is a respectable weepie, whereas “Poor Things” revels in the notion that, even at the last gasp, there may be a chance for Homo to grow a little more sapiens . If, as Bella points out, being alive is fascinating, why should the conclusion of the process be any less of an education? Hence the final words that we hear on the lips of the dying person: “It’s all very interesting, what is happening.” All’s well that ends. ♦

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The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made: An Indispensable Collection of Original Reviews of Box-Office Hits and Misses (Film Critics of the New York Times) Paperback – February 21, 2004

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From the first “talkies” to modern blockbusters, The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made collects the original reviews of the most popular and influential films exactly as they appeared in print, creating a fascinating history of nearly a century of cinema.

Written by such acclaimed critics as Vincent Canby, Janet Maslin, Elvis Mitchell, and others, the film reviews featured in this indispensable volume cover black and white classics, Technicolor musicals, widescreen extravaganzas, genre favorites, art films, and foreign masterpieces with honest and thought-provoking assessments that reflect the eras in which they were initially released.

With critiques of beloved European and Asian films by directors such as Truffaut, Fellini, Almodovar, and Kurosawa appearing beside Hollywood milestones from Kubrick, Spielberg, Hitchcock, and Welles, this book traces the careers of these groundbreaking filmmakers, and encapsulates the evolution of the medium and film criticism―making this an invaluable resource for any movie fan.

Special Features and Extras Include:

* Full cast and production credits for every movie * “The 10 Best” lists for every year starting in 1931 * Genre index: action/adventure; animated; comedy; crime/mystery/suspense; documentary; drama; horror; musical; mystery; science fiction; western * Foreign language film country of origin index

• Print length 1200 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date February 21, 2004
• Dimensions 7.24 x 2.06 x 9.18 inches
• ISBN-10 0312326114
• ISBN-13 978-0312326111
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Griffin; Revised, Updated & Revised edition (February 21, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312326114
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312326111
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.45 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.24 x 2.06 x 9.18 inches
• #287 in Movie Reference
• #351 in Movie Guides & Reviews
• #1,546 in Movie History & Criticism

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