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Pauline Kael Quotes
1919–2001 United States
Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic best remembered for the reviews she wrote for The New Yorker. Collections of her reviews were later published in book form.
United States Authors Film critics Journalists Also known as: Kael, Pauline
Random Pauline Kael quote
38 quotes
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.
Hooked (1989)
The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.
Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.
Hooked (1989)
It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, "What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?"
Movie Love (1991)
De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.
A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.
The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Hooked (1989)
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
State of the Art (1985)
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Going Steady (1969)
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.
Going Steady (1969)
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.
Going Steady (1969)
TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.
Taking It All In (1983)
Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.
If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?
Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.
Going Steady (1969)
Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
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