Movie Reviews
‘The Last Critic’ Review: A Captivating Portrait of Robert Christgau, the Brilliant Mad Professor of Rock Critics, and How He Made the Grade
As a critic, I should probably take offense at the title of “The Last Critic.” The movie is a captivating portrait of Robert Christgau, the legendary music writer who was one of the founding fathers of what was once known as “rock criticism.” (These were the days before poptimism, not to mention the Taylor Swift fan base.) To be fair, the film never asserts the claim of its title — that Christgau was or is “the last critic.” He was, in fact, one of the first writers to establish rock criticism as a vibrant and essential form, the others being Greil Marcus and the late Ellen Willis (both of whom he was close to; Marcus is featured in the documentary) as well as Lester Bangs, the brilliant bad boy who died in 1982.
The singular thing about Christgau is that he invented, and owned, his very own form of criticism. Born in 1942, he started out as a gifted writer and reporter, with the makings of a star journalist (in 1966, he published an award-winning piece about a girl who died from being on a macrobiotic diet). Attracting the attention of Esquire magazine, which was then at the epicenter of a hip new media world, he began to write a youth-culture column there, and in 1969 he came up with Christgau’s Consumer Guide, a monthly series of capsule reviews that would evaluate — and grade! — the latest slate of rock albums.
That doesn’t sound too remarkable, but Christgau’s prose had a quirky electricity, and in a world where rock writers were nerdish monks (Marcus was a rich-kid academic who smoked a pipe), he had a sixth sense for how to brand himself. An acerbic wise guy, brimming with egomaniacal snark, he once jokingly introduced himself as “the dean of American rock critics,” and the label stuck. From that point on, that’s how he was referred to and thought of.
In the Village Voice, where the Consumer Guide became one of the fabled alt-weekly’s go-to features from the ’70s through the ’90s, Christgau wrote like a possessed fan who breathed insight, making every capsule sound like a psychedelic sonnet. And the notion of affixing each densely compact review with a letter grade (from A+ to E-) was so counterintuitive — at least in the post-counterculture world — that it became Christgau’s signature.
He was playful in his judgments (on Prince’s “Dirty Mind”: “He takes care of the songwriting, transmutes the persona, revs up the guitar, muscles into the vocals, leans down hard on a rock-steady, funk-tinged four-four, and conceptualizes — about sex, mostly.” On Bryan Adams’ “Reckless”: “Maybe I’ll let Bruce Springsteen teach me how to hear John Cougar Mellencamp, but damned if I’m going to let John Cougar Mellencamp teach me how to hear Bryan Adams”). He was famous enough to inspire disgruntled album-track shoutouts from Lou Reed and Sonic Youth, and I guess that you could also call Christgau the unintentional godfather of Entertainment Weekly. At one point in the documentary, Christgau talks about a certain grade category he thinks of as “a high B+,” adding that “no one knows what that means” except him. As a critic who handed out grades at EW for decades, I may be just about the only other person on the planet who knows exactly what that means.
In “The Last Critic,” we meet Christgau as an elder stateman of rock-crit (he’s now 83), a downtown stalwart knocking around the streets of the East Village. He’s a bit more bent than he was, with white hair and a touch of arthritis, but he’s still a wry specimen, lean and mean, with a machine-gun mind, ageless in his vigor (and in his hunger for new music). And God bless him, he still pumps out the Consumer Guide each month (it’s now on Substack). The way he goes about it is the real subject of the documentary, because writing the Consumer Guide is the very spine of Robert Christgau’s life; every aspect of it reflects his obsessiveness. The film opens with him tapping out the following quote on an old word processor: “To the eternal ‘Opinions are like assholes — everyone’s got one,’ I just say, but not everybody’s got ten thousand of them.” Christgau has 14,000 reviews and counting, and that’s his glory and his compulsion.
He and his wife, the writer Caroline Dibbell, have lived in the same 2nd Ave. apartment for 50 years. And though it has seven rooms, Christgau has it organized like the encyclopedic pack rat he is. The place is lined with hundreds of feet of books, and he built special industrial shelves to house his 36,000 vinyl albums and CDs (and even cassette tapes), which cover every square inch of wall space in his cramped office. It’s his cave of knowledge, and he sits each day at the center of it, fumbling with CD players that kind of work, listening to music all day long, tapping out his thoughts on an old computer, feeling at every moment that this is his bliss. It’s criticism as a calling, a mission, a drive to find all the new music that’s good, and to capture each album’s worth in one heightened poetic paragraph. That’s what makes Christgau get up in the morning, and what keeps his spirit young. (Recovering from surgery, he won’t take three days off and not write.)
He has mellowed with age (actually, not much), but he’s still a wit and a scholar and a bit of a pedant. He’s bluntly contentious — in his heyday, he was not only a critic but a Village Voice editor who became fabled for his literary-dictator ways. He would make writers sweat (but only in the quest to make them the best version of themselves), and he would sometimes bike over to their apartments to stalk them for copy that was late. But what cemented the Christgau legend was the weirdly rational mania that informed the Consumer Guide. When it came to music, Christgau genuinely believed in the existence of a hidden grand order. He wanted to turn the act of consuming records into a system — a celestial hierarchy of judgment, of which he was the all-seeing lord.
That’s a way of thinking that some critics have (exhibit A: myself). Yet Christgau, through the Consumer Guide, was the only music critic to wear his system-making brains on the outside. The title of the column was a provocation, because here was this writer on the cutting edge of a rock world that still imagined itself as a “revolution,” yet he had the audacity to say that the revolution was a form of consumerism. He meant it as a joke (“I was thumbing my nose at my colleagues,” he says), the joke being that he was actually serious about it. He was going to grade the counterculture like the ultimate professor of cool.
And that’s what Christgau became. The documentary features plenty of footage of him back in the day, when a bohemian New York critic could still be a celebrity, and when he was just about the only person you could name who turned having long hair and oversize glasses and an ironic smirk into a punk look. He was like a sexy underground version of Poindexter. By the late ’70s, it felt like he was the last guy left with stringy hair that reached his shoulders, but the attitude was as far from hippie as you could get. Christgau was from Queens, the son of a fireman, and he had that working-class outer-borough lack of respect for the elites, even as he himself became one.
“The Last Critic,” directed with lively reverence by Matty Wishnow, is full of pithy testimonials to Christgau’s special qualities as a critic. We hear from writers like Kit Rachlis and Ann Powers and Amanda Petrusich and Chuck Eddy and Rob Sheffield. Nelson George and Greg Tate make the vital point that Christgau, in orchestrating a music review section in the ’70s that showcased diverse voices, walked the walk of what the Village Voice was supposed to be about. As someone who grew up in the early rock-crit days, I especially enjoyed the film’s portrait of Christgau’s friendship with Greil Marcus, an equally legendary critic based on the West Coast (we see the two of them seated today in Christgau’s living room, looking like the Statler and Waldorf of rock criticism). They wrote letters to each that were like intellectual mash notes, and they spoke several times a month on the phone but had serious disagreements. “I don’t think he feels hip-hop,” says Christgau of Marcus. “And I think that’s a function of whether you feel James Brown. And that’s a real gap.”
Christgau felt James Brown, all right (he was a major advocate of funk), but I would argue that his Achilles’ heel as a critic is that he didn’t feel pop. We see him in a TV interview from the ’80s where he catalogues his eclectic tastes, saying, “I love African music, I really love some country music, I like the best of what’s called world music, I love rap, I’ve got nothing against pop, I like funk and dance music quite a lot…” Consider that statement: I’ve got nothing against pop. It reflects something that nearly all the formative rock critics (with the exception of Stephen Holden) felt about pop music, which is that they actually did have something against it. They thought it was glossy, superficial, sentimental, fake, confectionary, corrupt, “commercial,” or some other descended-from-the-left-wing-ether bullshit. At one point in the documentary, we see a roster of albums in different Christgau grade categories, and forgive me, but I don’t live in a world where Sleater-Kinney’s “Dig Me Out” is an A and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is a B. (I live in a world where Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” is an A+, and where Hall and Oates are greater than the Replacements.) The anti-pop animus of classic rock criticism reflected nothing so much as a neurotic puritanism, or maybe just a snobbish inability to hear the deep beauty of pop.
My grousing aside, the early rock critics actually forged their own brand of beauty. The reason they were able to plant this form of criticism on the map is that they were extraordinary writers. What you feel, in every Robert Christgau capsule, is that he’s channeling whatever he’s writing about, and that’s what always made the Consumer Guide such a compulsive read — the drama of listening to Christgau let each of those albums flow through him. “The Last Critic” is a portrait of a venerable voice, but mostly it’s a testament to everything a great critic is: a priest, a fan, an assassin, an aesthete, a merciless truth-teller, and a vessel of love.
‘4’, the opening track on Richard D James’ (Aphex Twin) self titled 1996 album is a piece of music that beautifully balances the chaotic with the serene, the oppressive and the freeing. It’s a trick that James has pulled off multiple times throughout his career and it is a huge part of what makes him such an iconic and influential artist. Many people have laid the “next Aphex Twin” label on musicians who do things slightly different and when you actually hear their music you realise that, once again, the label is flawed and applied with a lazy attitude. Why mention this? Well, it turns out we’ve been looking for James’ heir apparent in the wrong artform. We’ve so zoned in on music that we’ve not noticed that another Celtic son of Cornwall is rewriting an art form with that highwire balancing act between chaos and beauty. That artist is writer, director and composer Mark Jenkin who over his last two feature films has announced himself as an idiosyncratic voice who is creating his very own language within the world of cinema. Jenkin’s films are often centred around coastal towns or islands and whilst they are experimental or even unsettling, there is always a big heart at the centre of the narrative. A heart that cares about family, tradition, culture, and the pull of ‘home’. Even during the horror of 2022’s brilliant Enys Men you were anchored by the vulnerability and determination of its main protagonist.
This month sees the release of Jenkin’s latest feature film, Rose of Nevada, which is set in a fractured and diminished Cornish coastal town. One day the fishing boat of the film’s title arrives back in harbour after being missing for thirty years. The boat is unoccupied. And frankly that is all the information you are going to get because to discuss any more plot would be unfair on you and disrespectful to Jenkin and the team behind the film. You the viewer should be the one who decides what it is about because thematically there are so many wonderful threads to pull on. This writer’s opinions on what it is about have ranged from a theme of sacrifice for the good of a community to the conflict within when part of you wants to run away from your roots whilst the other half longs to stay and be a lifelong part of its tapestry. Is it about Brexit? Could be. Is it about our own relationships with time and our curation of memory? Could be. Is it about both the positives and negatives of nostalgia? Could be. As a side note, anyone in their mid-40s, like me, who came of age in the 1990s will certainly find moments of warm recognition. Is the film about ghosts and how they haunt families? Could be…I think you get the point.
The elements that make the film so well balanced between chaos and calm are many. It is there in the differing performances between the brilliant two lead actors George MacKay and Callum Turner. It is there in the sound design which fluctuates from being unbearably harsh and metallic, to lulling and warm. It is there in the editing where short, sharp close ups on seemingly unimportant factors are counterbalanced with shots that are held for just that little bit too long. For a film set around the sea, it is apt that it can make you feel like you’re rolling on a stomach churning storm one minute, or a calming low tide the next. Dialogue can be front and centre or blurred and buried under static. One shot is bathed in harsh sunlight whilst the next can be drowned in interior shadows.
Rose of Nevada is Mark Jenkin’s most ambitious film to date yet he has not lost a single iota of innovation, singularity of vision or his gift for telling the most human of stories. It is a film that will tell you different things each time you see it and whilst there are moments that can confuse or beguile, there is so much empathy and love that it can leave you crying tears of emotional understanding. It is chaotic. It is beautiful. It is life……
Rose of Nevada is released on the 24th April.
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Review by Simon Tucker
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‘Hen’ movie review: György Pálfi pecks at Europe’s migrant crisis through the eyes of a chicken
A rogue chicken observes the world around it—and particularly the plight of immigrants in Greece—in Hen, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and is now playing in Prague cinemas (and with English subtitles at Kino Světozor and Edison Filmhub). This story of man through the eyes of an animal immediately recalls Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (and Jerzy Skolimowski’s more recent EO), but director and co-writer György Pálfi (Taxidermia) maintains a bitter, unsentimental approach that lands with unexpected force.
Hen opens with striking scenes inside an industrial poultry facility, where eggs are laid, processed, and shuttled along assembly lines of machinery and human hands in an almost mechanized rhythm of production. From this system emerges our protagonist: a black chick that immediately stands apart from the others, its entry into the world defined not by nature, but by an uncaring food industry.
The titular hen matures quickly within this environment before being loaded onto a truck with the others, presumably destined for slaughter. Because of her black plumage, she is singled out by the driver and rejected from the shipment, only to be told she will instead end up as soup in his wife’s kitchen. During a stop at a gas station, however, she escapes.
What follows is a journey through rural Greece by the sea, including an encounter with a fox, before she eventually finds refuge at a decaying roadside restaurant run by an older man (Yannis Kokiasmenos), his daughter (Maria Diakopanayotou), and her child. Discovered by the family’s dog Titan, she is placed in a coop alongside other chickens.
After finding a mate in the local rooster, she lays eggs that are regularly collected by the man; in one quietly unsettling scene, she watches him crack them open and cook them into an omelet. The hen repeatedly attempts to escape, as we slowly observe the true function of the property: it is being used as a transit point for migrants arriving in Greece by boat, facilitated by local criminal figures.
Like Au Hasard Balthazar and EO, Hen largely resists anthropomorphizing its animal protagonist. The hen behaves as a hen, and the humans treat her accordingly, creating a work that feels unusually grounded and almost documentary in texture. At the same time, Pálfi allows space for the audience to project meaning onto her journey, never fully closing the gap between instinct and interpretation.
There are moments, however, where the film deliberately leans into stylization. A playful montage set to Ravel’s Boléro captures her repeated escape attempts from the coop, while a romantic musical cue underscores her brief pairing with the rooster. These sequences do not break the realism so much as refract it, gently encouraging us to read emotion into behavior that remains, on the surface, purely animal.
One of the film’s central narrative threads is the hen’s search for a safe space to lay her eggs without them being taken away by the restaurant owner. This deceptively simple instinct becomes a powerful thematic mirror for the film’s human subplot involving migrant trafficking. Pálfi draws a stark, often uncomfortable parallel between the treatment of animals as commodities and the treatment of displaced people as disposable bodies moving through a similar system of exploitation.
The film takes an increasingly bleak turn toward its climax as the migrant storyline comes fully into focus, sharpening its allegorical intent. The juxtaposition of animal and human vulnerability becomes more explicit, reinforcing the film’s central critique of systemic indifference and violence. While effective, this escalation feels unusually dark, and our protagonist’s unknowing role feels particularly cruel.
The use of animal actors in Hen is remarkable throughout. The hen—played by eight trained chickens—is seamlessly integrated into the film’s world, with seamless editing (by Réka Lemhényi) and staging so precise that at times it feels almost impossible without digital augmentation. While subtle effects work must assist at certain moments, the result is convincing throughout, including standout sequences involving a fox and a dog.
Zoltán Dévényi and Giorgos Karvelas’ cinematography is also impressive, capturing both the intimacy of the hen’s low vantage point and the broader Greek landscape with striking clarity. The camera’s proximity to the animal world gives the film a distinct visual grammar, grounding its allegory in tactile observation rather than abstraction.
Hen is a challenging but often deeply affecting allegory that extends the tradition of animal-centered cinema while pushing it into harsher political territory. Pálfi’s approach—unsentimental, patient, and often confrontational—ensures the film lingers long after its final images. It is not an easy watch, nor a comfortable one, but it is a strikingly original piece of filmmaking that uses its unusual perspective to cast familiar human horrors in a stark, unsettling new light.
NEW YORK (OSV News) – Many potential brides and grooms-to-be have experienced cold feet in the lead-up to their nuptials. But few can have had their trotters quite so thoroughly chilled as the previously devoted fiance at the center of writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative psychological study “The Drama” (A24).
Played by Robert Pattinson, British-born, Boston-based museum curator Charlie Thompson begins the film delighted at the prospect of tying the knot with his live-in girlfriend Emma Harwood (Zendaya). But then comes a visit to their caterers where, after much wine has been sampled, the couple wanders down a dangerous conversational path with disastrous results.
Together with their husband-and-wife matron of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), and best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Charlie and Emma take turns recounting the worst thing they’ve ever done. For Emma, this involves a potential act of profound evil that she planned in her mind but was ultimately dissuaded from carrying out, instead undergoing a kind of conversion.
Emma’s revelation disturbs all three of her companions but leaves Charlie reeling. With only days to go before the wedding, he finds himself forced to reassess his entire relationship with Emma.
As Charlie wavers between loyalty to the person he thought he knew and fear of hitching himself to someone he may never really have understood at all, he’s cast into emotional turmoil. For their part, Rachel and Mike also wrestle with how to react to the situation.
Among other ramifications, Borgli’s screenplay examines the effect of the bombshell on Emma and Charlie’s sexual interaction. So only grown viewers with a high tolerance for such material should accompany the duo through this dark passage in their lives. They’ll likely find the experience insightful but unsettling.
The film contains strong sexual content, including aberrant acts and glimpses of graphic premarital activity, cohabitation, a sequence involving gory physical violence, a narcotics theme, about a half-dozen uses of profanity, a couple of milder oaths, pervasive rough language, numerous crude expressions and obscene gestures. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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