pauline kael bot

[CONVOY] Probably Peckinpah intended to make a simple action movie, but something in him must have balked at that. He saw the trucks and the skies and he kept shooting, like Eisenstein when he saw the faces of the Indians in Mexico. (1978)

It’s as if [THE GODFATHER, PART II] satisfied an impossible yet basic human desire to see what our parents were like before we were born and to see what they did that affected what we became — not to hear about it, or to read about it, as we can in novels, but actually to see it. (1974)

As a hysteric, Gene Wilder is even funnier than Peter Sellers. For Sellers, hysteria is just one more weapon in his comic arsenal—his hysteria mocks hysteria—but Wilder's hysteria seems perfectly natural. (1974)

RED RIVER is not really so "great" as its devotees claim (what Western is?), and a lot of it is just terrible, but Clift—in his most aggressively sexual screen performance—is angular and tense and audacious, and the other actors brawl amusingly in the strong-silent-man tradition.

[STARDUST MEMORIES] If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying. (1980)

A movie on television is no longer just a drama in itself; it is part of a huge ongoing parade. (1967)

Streisand's voice is her instrument; Midler's audience is her instrument. She plays on us and we bring her to life, or at least she makes us feel that we do. (1980)

[SIXTEEN CANDLES] Anthony Michael Hall is in fact no more than a year older than the freshman he's playing. His Geek is a computer-age teen version of the early Woody Allen character—the fast-talking genius nerd—but Hall moves like Steve Martin, and even more confidently. (1984)

Yeah

Any picture that features Isabelle Huppert is likely to be somewhat numbing. (Right now, if you want to go to the movies she's hard to avoid, though it's worth the effort.) (1980)

The director Rob Reiner doesn’t have the craft to bring off the kinetic daredeviltry he tries for in THE PRINCESS BRIDE, and the movie is ungainly—you can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting. (1987)

Young filmmakers generally know almost nothing about how to handle actors, but probably all filmmakers have unhappy or "unfulfilled" friends eager to have a movie made of their lives; fame is probably the cure they seek. (1970)

NINOTCHKA (1939)

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, this light, satirical comedy has the nonchalance and sophistication which were his trademark—but it also reveals that this time the trade marked him too high.

[ANNIE HALL] Here, as almost everywhere else in Woody Allen's films, Jews have no dignity. That's just about how he defines them and why he's humiliated by them. (1980)

What I love about Jonathan Demme is that he searches for poetry in the tacky, the everyday. I value that much more highly than the so-called tasteful movies people make. It takes more courage to be as unhighfalutin and democratic as he. (1988)

[BROADCAST NEWS] Hurt gives him a suggestion of sensitivity: Tom isn't glib like Aaron and Jane—he needs pauses before he speaks, he needs to register things. So at times he seems genuinely attractive. (1988)

THE UNTOUCHABLES is not a great movie; it's too banal, too morally comfortable. The great gangster pictures don't make good and evil mutually exclusive, the way they are here. (1987)

When it comes to Godard you can only follow and be destroyed. Other filmmakers see the rashness and speed and flamboyance of his complexity; they're conscious of it all the time, and they love it, and, of course, they're right to love it. But they can't walk behind him. (1968)

FAHRENHEIT 451 is more interesting in the talking-over afterward than in the seeing. (1966)

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

Every turn and twist is exactly calculated and achieves its effect with the simplest of means; this shrewd, smooth, tawdry thriller is one of the high points of 40s films.

Recently, I've noticed that some of us critics express more disgust with the brutality of movies privately than publicly; in our columns we tend to ignore the gore or be rather jocular about it, as if only quaint old folks could react the way we ourselves actually reacted. (1971)

Yet Teri Garr always takes us by surprise; she has become the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen. (1982)

Though BRINGING UP BABY hasn't the prestige or reputation of Hepburn's later comedy success, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, it's her best comedy. (1967)

[M*A*S*H] The throwaway stuff isn't really thrown away; it all helps to create the free, graceful atmosphere that sustains the movie and keeps it consistently funny. (1970)

[PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE] As the movie goes on there's something touching in his petulant weirdness, and sometimes, when his makeup isn't quite as thick and stylized as usual, you may feel that you can perceive a sensitivity, a gentleness, in him. (1985)

[THE TURNING POINT] Most of the characters are so heartland ordinary—they're shaped to be so much like the filmmakers' idea of you and me—that they disinfect one's imagination. (1977)

Q&A (1990)

Nick Nolte, in dark hair that makes him look like a vampire, is a big, bulky Irish cop with a vicious streak...But the standout performance is given by Luis Guzman as a Hispanic police detective who's pressured to be "dirty."

[THE THIEF WHO CAME TO DINNER] It's dismaying when a sausage movie like this one, which should be tied up, is open-ended. The picture isn't terrible; it's faintly diverting while you're watching...but the vacuity and even that charm become oppressive. (1973)

[AMERICAN GRAFFITI] The audiences allow the fifties jukebox tunes on the track to define their early lives for them. I think they can laugh so easily because the shared recognitions are all external; it's the giggle you get from looking at a false image of yourself. (1973)

[SMALL CHANGE] It is lovely: some of the gags are timed with such sneaky rightness that they pop, like party surprises. But it's far from flawless. (1976)