As a critic, there's a very particular kind of mid-life crisis that creeps up on you: One day you wake up in a cold sweat and realize that despite having been inspired to write about cinema by such masters as Hitchcock, Truffaut, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Kubrick, et al., you now spend most of your time watching stuff by hollow-heads like Bay, Snyder and Bruckheimer.
It's a grim moment, but an even worse one awaits down the line: That's when you realize that art cinema has traveled so far up its own rear end, and exists so entirely in terms of knee-jerk opposition to Hollywood, that the trumpeted champions of the film-festival circuit are mostly emperors without clothes.
Lars von Trier? Empty provocation. Bruno Dumont? Painfully pretentious. Park Chan-wook? Ludicrous splatter-flick content with bits that don't make sense, which presumably is the "art." Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Carlos Reygadas? Wake me when it's over. But perhaps the most overrated of all is that Austrian master of rubbing your nose in it, Michael Haneke.
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