Pauline Kael Quotes

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

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.

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion; now B movies are a substitute for religion.

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.

Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney.

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.

I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.

He [Bernardo Bertolucci] has the kind of talent that breaks one's heart: where can it go, what will happen to it? In this country we encourage 'creativity' among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow 'too much.' Well, Before the Revolution is too much and that is what is great about it. Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?

a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images.

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.

In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.

Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.

The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.