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What I like about your writing, which seems to typify the alt-weekly style, is that the writing is fast and loose and you're not afraid or ashamed of using "bad" words.

NL: Let me give you an example. I wrote a review of The Duchess of Langeais, the Jacques Rivette film. It was an 800-word feature review in the Voice; it was not a review I tossed off, it's one I thought about quite a bit, I was analyzing Rivette's mise-en-scene, and re-reading his criticism, and taking the film quite seriously. Within this, in a sentence, I use the word "boner." And I had an older critic on his blog write this huge attack on my review because of this word, because I was supposedly being childish. And I thought, do we really have no sense of humor? That this one word, out of 800, which were clearly impassioned and well thought out. Really, I can't use the word "boner?" Will people just chill the f--- out? If I can't throw off a bit of fireworks, what's the point? So there's this [idea] that you have to be serious, but you can't have any fun...it's very strange.

It seems more critics could be more entertaining and original as writers, and still know what they're talking about.

NL: Well that's a hard combination. Anyone can turn a sassy phrase, but do they have anything to back it up? Anthony Lane is a very witty, very funny writer -- and he doesn't know shit about movies. No one who takes movies seriously takes him remotely seriously. I read him because it's very funny; he's a good writer. But I don't listen to anything he has to say; he has no authority because he doesn't take what he's doing seriously.

I find most film writing almost...unreadable. And the longer I write, the less of it I try to read. I think that keeps me a better writer. I'm reading all the time, but I can learn more about the movies I'm seeing this week from reading a great 19th century novel than I can from whatever XYZ critic has to say this week about whatever. I think another problem with movie writing is that it's insular, especially Internet writing. It's so narrow and insular and just about movies, and I think to be a really good writer and film critic you need a range. You need to know what's going on in painting, you need to know what's going on in music, you need to read books, and get laid, and go to restaurants, you know what I mean? A lot of movie writing is very impassioned but it's very limited, very narrow. And I think good critics can put movies into a larger cultural and social perspective.

And that's what a good critic should be. I definitely think there's a difference between a film critic and a film reviewer.

NL: But even the critics, even the ones that do real criticism, I find oftentimes very cut off from the rest of the world. One of the young critics who I think is really good is Ed Gonzalez, who writes for Slant, because when you read him, agree with him or not, he's someone who is clearly paying attention to politics, clearly paying attention to pop culture, knows movies really well, and brings all this to bear. In a way that is lively and interesting.

Maybe there are too many film critics and/or reviewers out there right now.

NL: There's too many and they're not good enough. This is partly a generational thing, but it's hard to pin it down -- and I don't want to say, like, "Down with Grandpa" across the board -- but I have found it always frustrating as a young critic that the older generation dominates the discourse. Again, I don't know that there's a younger generation that's either smart or prepared enough to move into that place.

The sad thing is that critics, we're expendable because the people making the money don't need us -- the studios and the papers. Critics are one of the few points of resistance between multi-million dollar marketing campaigns and their audience. But hey, welcome to late capitalism.

What's your background as a critic? How did you get to where you are at such a young age?

NL: I have what I call a self-inflicted education. Didn't study journalism, didn't study film... I have a mysterious past. [Laughs] Let's leave it shrouded in mystery. My first love was literature; modern literature, poetry. I've always been into film but my first real love was literature, and also painting and fine art. But I've been a pretty passionate cinephile since my teens, when I really started watching art house and foreign films, and people like David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

Do you remember the first movie that you loved?

NL: I was a Star Wars baby. The interesting thing for me is that my real first love was horror films. I was a real horror film fanatic as a teenager. Rented every tawdry slasher film, I was really into it. And this passion for that kind of genre film -- sci-fi, horror -- led me to David Cronenberg, to movies like Dead Ringers and Videodrome. And Cronenberg was, above anyone else, a figure that merged a kind of genre enthusiasm with a greater sense of a cinema of ideas. Specifically, Videodrome and Dead Ringers were movies that opened up new vistas for me and I've been a really passionate devotee of his ever since. If you were to ask me who my favorite director is, I think the one closest to my heart is Cronenberg, who I've been watching and re-watching -- almost every film every year since I was fifteen. I think he has the most inexhaustible body of work in modern movies.


To read Nathan Lee's reviews for the Village Voice, check out his author page here.