Congrats to the ultra-dweeby Guy Lodge, a longtime Variety stringer and an insightful film nut, upon his hiring as Variety‘s new co-chief film critic, replacing Peter Debruge and now on equal footing with co-honcho Owen Gleiberman.
HE admired and respected Lodge all through the first 15 or so years of this century. We first met 20 or so years ago…drinks in London, Cannes schmoozings, a dinner in Paris, etc. And then Lodge went wokey-woke and snooty-snoot in the late teens. Okay, fine…all film critics are woke these days and Lodge, an excellent writer, is no different. But he can also be, to be fair, a reasonably supple mainstream guy on occasion.
12 years ago I was delighted by Lodge’s praise for Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper: “Among the many things that appear to be on Assayas’s mind is the disembodied — and disembodying — nature of modern-day communication and social media, which makes ghosts of us all to those with whom we text far more than we talk. Perhaps no film has ever made the mobile phone quite such an instrument of tension: the on-screen iPhone ellipsis of an incoming message takes on a breath-halting urgency here. No more should be revealed about the film’s gliding, glassy sashay through multiple, splintered genres and levels of consciousness – except to say that Assayas, working in the high-concept, game-playing vein of his Irma Vep and demonlover, is in shivery control of it all.”
Three or four years later the woke virus began to manifest, and Lodge was infected along with the rest. A certain tone of dutiful cult servitude began to settle in.
From “A Fifth Body Snatchers is Required“, posted on 1.9.18: “Friends and family members of seed-pod film critics have begun to notice a certain robotic manner and a glassy, out-to-lunch look in their eyes. Local constable: “But he looks like his picture, madam. Obviously he’s Guy Lodge, the Variety critic.” Mrs. Lodge: “But it isn’t him, I’m telling you. Something is missing. It’s just not Guy!”
Posted three and a half years ago:
Posted on 12.7.25: “Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.”
