Browbeaten

R. Emmet Sweeney—yes, one of the members of Team Disambiguation—on the recently concluded New York Film Festival:

The coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival was weirdly tendentious, culminating in A.O. Scott’s bizarre NY Times dispatch in which he claims (I paraphrase), that there is a cabal of scheming festival programmers who hate humanity and eagerly promote films which espouse a “principle of innate depravity.” I’m (slightly) exaggerating his argument, but he adopts a strikingly strident tone for a diverse slate of movies, grandly sweeping complex works of art into his “festival” category so he can haughtily ignore them. What he yearns for, it seems, are films of “high-minded middlebrowism.” Don’t we have the next two months of Oscar-bait to satisfy that particular need? —TCM's Classic Movie Blog