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Film Quotes by Pauline Kael

27 Film quotes by Pauline Kael

All Film quotes Pauline Kael’s page

Pauline Kael’s twenty‑seven excerpts read like a masterclass in film criticism, each one sharp, witty, and unapologetically honest. Her keen eye for narrative and style shines through, providing a dense but rewarding collection for anyone who loves thoughtful analysis.

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

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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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

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

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

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We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter,…

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An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to…

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If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if…

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Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public…

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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…

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Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of…

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A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a…

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“...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads…

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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break…

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There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the…

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The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I…

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In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're…

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Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of…

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Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood…

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“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a…

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More by Pauline Kael

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

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Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities…

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

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A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a…

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The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think…

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

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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

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Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to…

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

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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…

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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

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if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I…

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

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

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