Is Armond White the GOAT film critic?

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disagree with a lot of his opinions

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I think that was the OPs point

Is this dude the Skip Bayless of movie critics?

could he be any more transparent in wishing to be Pauline Kael

He was spot-on in his review of The Force Awakens though especially about how filmmaking started to decline after Star Wars was released in 1977.

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Everyone knows the Star Wars series peaked with that confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the villain, Darth Vader (played on screen by David Prowse, but voiced by James Earl Jones). The “Luke, I am your father” revelation resonated because it expressed how George Lucas, like his movie-brat peers (Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma) struggled with Sixties generational ambivalence. A father–son antagonism resounds through all their films as a reflection of Vietnam-era student protests and the privilege of those draft-dodging filmmaker progeny. Even Lucas, in his escapist outer-space mode, iterated the era’s unease, culminating in Luke’s fear and symbolic castration.

It’s seldom realized that the movie brats’ films are essentially conservative, politically speaking. Yet, in the new millennium, filmgoers’ superficial political awareness makes them nostalgic for Star Wars to maintain the gullibility of their youth. Longing for innocence is all that the insipidness of the latest sequel, The Force Awakens, signifies. When director J. J. Abrams re-stages that primal moment, he does it for brand recognition, but so unimaginatively that it feels hackneyed. Even though it’s meant to be painful for rabid Star Wars fanatics, it lacks mythological significance. Star Wars fans are not required to think metaphorically, so any Oedipal meaning is lost (although there is something of millennial ingratitude in the new filial confrontation), just as the original scene’s impact was ignored in subsequent sequels.

The new characters in The Force Awakens are banal. John Boyega’s black superhero, Finn, updates and restyles Han Solo’s jockish heroism — a cultural evolution that evokes Obama (“I was taken from a family I’ll never know”) for global commercialism. Boyega is appealing-enough to surpass the series’ previous racial tokens, Billy Dee Williams and Samuel L. Jackson, but he is subordinate to the new gallantry of Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who embodies the female empowerment denied to Princess (now General) Leia. Rey “leans in” when she grips the Skywalker light saber, so that feminists can rejoice at the Disney Corporation’s calculated political correctness (although Rey’s competence with weaponry contradicts liberals’ convenient attitudes toward gun control.)

By now we all should know that there’s nothing of adult interest in Star Wars. Even when it premiered back in 1977, the sci-fi premise and comic-book characters were eclipsed artistically by the visionary spirituality of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yet the continued prominence of Star Wars signifies something that is politically serious, if not dreadful: The great renaissance of American filmmaking during the 1970s and its regeneration of film culture (when movies were seen as a vital means of approaching and understanding contemporary experience) were doomed by Star Wars’ pseudo-imaginative, non-campy rehash of escapist junk. Now, the rebooted, politically empty The Force Awakens suggests a boot stuck in the rear of film culture’s flabby remains.

TV-show runner J. J. Abrams brings his game-changing banality to the Star Wars franchise. He follows the template as originated by Lucas and appeals to adolescent thralldom, keeping the brand recognizable. The Force Awakens is paced better than Star Wars’ other dismal episodes, yet it’s even more impersonal. There’s no visual or spiritual excitement, as there was even in a cynical sci-fi product like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Abrams is making product to salute the cultural and economic status quo. With Star Wars, product has not only taken the place of art; it has replaced myth.

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I would think it would be exhausting to be that contrarian all the time.

His Rogue One review is great too. Star Wars fanboys will call it trolling because they can't take honest criticism but I think its a fair review.

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I would think it would be exhausting to be that contrarian all the time.

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White has given plenty of positive reviews to well-reviewed movies.

Sully (85%)- This is the most affecting portrait of Americans at work since Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. These faces are believably unglamorous; the actors convey convincing blue- and white-collar normalcy. Tom Hanks is in a “heroic” mode different from any he’s been in before, capturing the suppressed egotism of the real Sullenberger. This difficult trait gives distinction to Eastwood’s class-based survey, which includes not only the proficient ferry crews and scuba cops who came to Flight 1549’s rescue but also the NTSB’s bureaucratic hostility. (Note how Anna Gunn as a board adjudicator minimally conveys more credible career struggle than she did in her lame feminist vehicle Equity.) There’s a folkloric quality here that, on reflection of 9/11, is a moving reminder of human decency. It’s better than the mainstream media’s reflexive term “heroism.”

Hacksaw Ridge (86%)- Hacksaw Ridge provides a long-awaited cultural rejoinder to the violence in Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s culture-shaking tribute to WWII martyrdom. But Spielberg’s film needn’t be the definitive WWII movie, and neither should Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Clint Eastwood’s diptych Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jimo, or Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Gibson forsakes the self-righteousness of those films and provides the substance — the reproof of violence — absent from all those movies that are so shamelessly geeked-up by the boyish excitement of fighting and death.

Arrival (94%)- As a science-fiction film with political undertones, Arrival improves on the 2009 District 9, in which an alien orb also hovered above Earth and panicked civilization. Arrival is distinguished by its spiritual overtones, a hallmark of director Denis Villeneuve, who uses the sci-fi scenario to examine the philosophical tensions felt by his characters. Linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is forced to rethink everything she knows and has experienced when she and physicist-mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are enlisted by the U.S. government to help decode messages and communicate with the aliens. Villeneuve’s psychological emphasis differs from the shrillness of District 9’s post-Apartheid scenario, a silly conceit that did not live up to the speculative potential of sci-fi. The moody introspection and intricate plot design of Arrival make it District 9 for adults.


Hell or High Water (98%)- All genre movies are contrived, but both Hell or High Water and Blood Father dramatize genuine emotion. Chris Pine’s intense, suffering movie-star blue eyes (as bright and romantic as Gibson’s used to be) match the gravity of Bridges’s and Birmingham’s lived-in humor and cynicism. Their complicated differences meet in a final scene — a moral draw — that defines how we live today.

Jackie (87%)- Natalie Portman’s impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy in the movie Jackie explores the emotional balancing act of a famous woman, wife of the most powerful man in the world, intimate witness to his murder, and inadvertent political player on the field of decorum that was her lot in life. The film itself is a project teetering between fact and legend. Portman empathically portrays the eternal pop icon as someone who was deprived of ever having a private moment. So, every scene — setting out the terms of an interview to a journalist or screaming to the universe from the back seat of a blood-strewn limousine — calls for an existential examination. It’s a tour de force that works precisely because it doesn’t have to be totally convincing, just insightful.


Hidden Figures (93%)- No one had measured for progress as the NASA prepared for the computer age, and another good metaphor shows a doorway being enlarged for the mammoth in-coming IBM computers. Hidden Figures isn’t a ground-, ceiling-, door-, or wall-breaking movie, but it entertains through its cast’s charm. Spencer eases into the matriarch role with comic toughness. Henson, recently of the trashy TV series Empire, finally plays a human being who takes some personal responsibility. Monáe lends sass to social determination. While Hidden Figures doesn’t address the issues of intelligence and gender roles with the depth and ingenuity of Akeelah and the Bee, the filmmakers avoid sanctimony and show no sense of entitlement. Their approach to history is on a human scale, so that the scene where Henson enters the sanctum of white mathematicians and sits alone, with no one talking to her, becomes emblematic of “progress” among the enlightened class. (But the running gag of Henson’s trekking outside for lavatory breaks doesn’t work. The accompanying song “I don’t want a free ride / I’m just sick and tired of running” is pseudo-soulful grandstanding.)