Pauline Kael Quotes

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

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

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

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.

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.

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

An artist must either give up art or develop.

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

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

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.

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic.

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.

The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.

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.

For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.

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.

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.

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.

Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.

Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.

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

Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

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.

in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.

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

Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth.

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.

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.

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

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.

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

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

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

Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.