pauline kael bot

Jean Renoir has often said that when a movie spells everything out, the public has "nothing to add" and there's no "collaboration." (1974)

I know that I've failed in some of these reviews—dismissing big, bludgeoning movies without realizing how much they might mean to people, rejecting humid sentiment and imagining that no one could be affected by it. (1976)

BEAT THE DEVIL is a mess, but it's probably the funniest mess—the screwball classic—of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way by finding a style of its own. (1967)

[POPEYE] Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit into it. Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with, and working from that, goes way past it. (1980)

Yes, we want more from movies than we get from the usual commercial entertainments, but would anybody use terms like mature, adult, and sober for THE RULES OF THE GAME or BREATHLESS or CITIZEN KANE or JULES AND JIM? (1967)

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Montgomery Clift has the control to charm—almost to seduce—an audience without ever stepping outside his inflexible, none-too-smart character. Burt Lancaster has a role that's just about perfectly in his range as Sergeant Warden.

George Segal seems to be one of the few actors to find their challenge in acting, and he gives his roles solidity and some human weight—the way Spencer Tracy did but without Tracy's boring pugnacity. (1971)

What makes a "Western" is no longer the wide open spaces but the presence of men like John Wayne, James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster, grinning with their big new choppers, sucking their guts up into their chests, and hauling themselves onto horses. (1967)

Ken Russell seems almost cursed by his subjects; he seems to want something from them, but each time he gets close to them he dances away. His movies are charged with sex, but it's androgynous sex, and sterile. (1972)

[Jane Campion] She does have a gift for imagery. But she's totally arbitrary, in an art-school way. Things don't hang together in her movies. The symbolism never registers fully, because you can't tell what she's symbolizing, though you know damn well it's symbolic. (1994)

I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies; I don't trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn't need to find their way through trash. (1969)

[THE BETSY] Laurence Olivier, who plays the superabundantly sexed patriarch of an automobile dynasty, stands out with startling boldness, and one begins to perceive the secret of his greatness: Laurence Olivier dares to be foolish. (1978)

LOS OLVIVADOS (1951)

Buñuel treats his characters pitilessly, not as ideas, but as morally responsible human beings; there is little of the social workers' cant that makes everyone responsible for juvenile crimes except the juveniles.

But Kazan used to know how to help us feel. Perhaps he undervalues that gift, but it's his only true one. Is it really a penance for a big movie director to try to think small? In movies, the worst sellout has always been thinking big. (1969)

Using women (and not only women) as plot functions may be a clue to the shallowness of many movies, even of much better movies—AMERICAN GRAFFITI, for example. (1973)

That could be [Schrader's] swindling genius; he's a propagandist without a cause. In puritan tones, he tells us that the world is an ugly place and you can't change a thing. If you stick up your head, they chop it off. (1978)

THE GRADUATE isn’t a bad movie, it’s entertaining, though in a fairly slick way (the audience is just about programmed for laughs). What’s surprising is that so many people take it so seriously. (1969)

There's nothing under PULP FICTION, no serious undercurrents. And I didn't find any of the important "statements" I had read about in the reviews, but it's got a crazy good humor. Tarantino has a flair for pop dialogue, and a flair for casting. He used wonderful people. (1994)

In his book on Hitchcock, whenever Hitchcock explains how something was calculated to tease and please the audience, Truffaut interprets the explanation as if this were the meaning of art. It can, however, be the meaning of commerce, and of emptiness. (1969)

[FULL METAL JACKET] The movie has no center, because Kubrick has turned this hero into a replica of himself: his Joker is always at a distance—he doesn’t express his feelings. So the movie comes across as not meaning anything. (1987)

[MEAN STREETS] What Scorsese, who is thirty, has done with the experience of growing up in New York's Little Italy has a thicker-textured rot and violence than we have ever had in an American movie, and a riper sense of evil. (1973)

[CITIZEN KANE] It was bouncy Pop Gothic in a period when the term “comic strip” applied to works of art was still a term of abuse. (1971)

I thought MISSION TO MARS had some extraordinary sequences in it. I'm always attacked for liking Brian De Palma so much, and it's a very uneven, erratic movie. But about half of it is superb. (2001)

ACCIDENT is, despite what Losey and Pinter say in it, for and of "the upper classes." They use a lot of craftsmanship and technique to pave the old dirt roads. (1967)

LOLA (1961)

Demy gently mocks romantic movie effects, which he employs more romantically than ever. Characters suddenly get rich or are stranded on an island, and Lola's dreams come true—and not just her dreams but her illusions.

We could stand the deadpan reserve of Nelson Eddy's non-acting because he gave of himself when he sang, but Eastwood doesn't give of himself ever, and a musical with a withdrawn hero is almost a contradiction in terms. (1969)

Sam Peckinpah is the youngest legendary American director. (1972)

[THE GODFATHER, PART II] Coppola might almost have a pact with the audience; we’re already so engrossed in the Corleones that now he can go on to give us a more interior view of the characters at the same time that he shows their spreading social influence. (1974)

I got Chris Farley a couple of times, but just a couple of times. The rest of the time his grossness was just appalling. (2001)

If you write critically, you have to do something besides get excited. You have to examine what's in front of you. What you see is a movie industry in decay, and they decay gets worse and worse. (2001)