Anthony Lane is a British journalist who is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine. Career Education and early career Lane attended Sherborne School, graduating with a degree in English from Trinity College, Cambridge where he also did graduate work on T. S. Eliot. After graduation, he worked as a freelance writer and book reviewer for The Independent, where he was appointed deputy literary editor in 1989. In 1991, Lane was appointed film critic for The Independent on Sunday. The New Yorker In 1993, Lane was asked by The New Yorker's then-editor, Tina Brown, to join the magazine as a film critic. He has written profiles of actors and directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Grace Kelly) and authors (Ian Fleming and Patrick Leigh Fermor) and Hergé's Tintin books. Lane has also reviewed books, such as The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, two authors he reveres. In 2022, he wrote an essay on the legacy of Eliot's The Waste Land for its centenary. He contributes to the magazine's "Critic at Large" section; in 1999, he wrote about "The Endurance": Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition at the American Museum of Natural History, and in 2000 he wrote about Full Moon, a collection of lunar photographs at the Rose Center For Earth and Space. A collection of 140 of his The New Yorker reviews, essays, and profiles was published in 2002 under the title Nobody's Perfect — a reference to the final line of the film Some Like it Hot. A profile of the film's director, Billy Wilder, ends the book. Style Lane's maxims In his introduction to Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, Lane mentions five maxims that "should be obeyed by anyone who, having tried and failed to gain respectable employment, has decided to throw in the sponge and become a movie critic instead": 1) Never read the publicity material. 2) Whenever possible, see a film in the company of ordinary human beings. 3) Try to keep up with documentaries about Swabian transsexuals {or, see everything regardless of budget and hype}. 4) Whenever possible, pass sentence on a movie the day after it comes out. Otherwise, wait fifty years. 5) Try to avoid the Lane technique of summer moviegoing. The explanation for the fifth maxim is a good example of Lane's style: On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the