pauline kael bot

What looks ugly and depressing must be true, since what looks prosperous is as empty as an ad. (1954)

The most interesting film I’ve seen this year is one that premiered on television: the one called HEARTS OF DARKNESS...It’s a very scary, funny, remarkable movie. In many ways it’s far more interesting than APOCALYPSE NOW was. It really is something. (1992)

I sometimes read these very well-educated critics writing their hearts out on crap, and I'm depressed because they're wasting so much first-rate intellect on such low-grade material. (2001)

Our society is disastrously utilitarian. We can no longer distinguish the ad from the entertainment, the front cover of the national magazine, in which an actor poses to plug his film, from the back cover in which an actor sells cigarettes and indirectly also plugs a film. (1965)

Bob Dylan the movie star was a witch-boy, ethereal, with his fluffy hair in the halo of lights, but frightening, too; his put-downs were bad magic. (1968)

And I dislike LA NOTTE. Perhaps detest is the better word. (1962)

HIGH AND DRY (1954)

A piece of American folklore—the innocent American vanquishing the wicked, experienced Europeans—is set bottomside up. The bullishly efficient American millionaire (Paul Douglas) is no match for a group of Scots with fiendishly winning ways.

The comic spirit of the thirties had been happily self-critical about America, the happiness born of the knowledge that in no other country were movies so free to be self-critical. It was the comedy of a country that didn't yet hate itself. (1971)

[A STAR IS BORN] The picture is a drippy love story about two people who love each other selflessly. And so the scenes between Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, which one would expect to have some sexual combustion, are exhaustingly, fraudulently romantic. (1977)

[KING KONG] She has one-liners so dumb that the audience laughs and moans at the same time, yet they're in character, and when Jessica Lange says them she holds the eye, and you like her, the way people liked Lombard. (1977)

Bogdanovich's star-creation, Cybill Shepherd, had something in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: she was desirable in a mean, Gloria-Grahame-like way. She didn't have Graham's marvelous trashiness (or her acting control, either), but she aroused the same vindictive masculinity. (1975)

Steven Spielberg is probably the most gifted American director who's dedicated to sheer entertainment. He may have different aims from the aims of people we call artists, but he has integrity: it centers on his means. (1977)

KITTY FOYLE (1940)

Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her ""serious"" performance as a white-collar girl whose baby dies. In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when she failed.

[NETWORK] The film looks negligently made; the lighting bleaches the actors' faces, like color TV that needs tuning, and the New York views outside the office and apartment windows feel like blown-up photographs. (1976)

[TOP GUN] The result is a new “art” form: the self-referential commercial. TOP GUN is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster. (1986)

GABLE AND LOMBARD has nothing to say about the movies, about love, or about stardom. It has no point of view whatever. The movie represents upwardly mobile nostalgia—nostalgia used for its safeness, its uncontroversial, Ford-era nothingness. (1976)

Michelle Pfeiffer really is extraordinary, too. She's so crystalline in her beauty, she's such a vision, that people may not recognize what a talented actress she is. (1989)

Sarah Jessica Parker, twirling around him, her long, curly hair like eiderdown, is the natural heroine of an L.A. movie. She's the spirit of L.A.: she keeps saying yes. (1991)

[THE KING OF COMEDY] What De Niro is doing might be based on the Warholian idea that the best parody of a thing is the thing itself. (1983)

IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (1954)

Judy Holliday in a pleasantly erratic satirical comedy; the targets—advertising, TV, and urban gullibility—are rather easily pinked, but the scenarist, Garson Kanin, and the director, George Cukor, don't loiter over them for long.

ROSELAND makes you feel that it was produced in 1936 but didn't reach the screen until now because nobody had the vitality to thread the projector. The movie has had a spinal tap. (1977)

Renoir is an unobtrusive, unselfconscious storyteller: he doesn't "make points," he doesn't rub our noses in "meaning." (1966)

San Francisco is like Ireland. If you want to do something, you've got to get out. (1989)

[BULL DURHAM] As Costner plays the part, he's hyper-articulate, smart, and cocky. Costner lets you see that Crash is lonely, but he underplays the loneliness; it's just a tone blended in with his other tones. (1988)

[Shelley Duvall] She doesn't appear to project—she's just there. Yet you feel as if you read her every thought; she convinces you that she has no veils and nothing hidden. Her charm appears to be totally without affectation. (1974)

Maybe Billie Holiday willed that effect of being a lone, small voice in the wilderness—isolation rooted in the sound—because that was the only way she could make a great instrument out of her limited voice, and because she meant to wound, not to heal. (1972)

STELLA DALLAS (1937)

The picture is all Barbara Stanwyck's, and worth seeing for her brassy, touching, all-out performance (possibly her greatest), even if pictures about maternal love and self-sacrifice give you the heebie-jeebies.

There are films that get by because they give people a secure feeling, and people can take in ROOSTER COGBURN the way they take in TV movies—inattentively, satisfied that everything's going according to plan. (1975)

[SPLASH] John Candy makes you aware of his bulk by the tricks in his verbal timing: when Hanks has said something to him and you expect him to answer, his hesitation—it's like a few seconds of hippo torpor—is what makes his answer funny. (1984)

[1900] [Bertolucci] knowingly risks grandiloquence, believing that this is the path to a people’s art—that moviegoers want ro­mance, myth, and their own struggles turned into poetry and fantasy. (1977)