Pauline Kael quotes

Pauline Kael was an influential American film critic, renowned for her passionate and incisive writing for The New Yorker. Her bold opinions and distinctive voice helped shape the standards of modern film criticism. She inspired generations of critics with her wit, insight, and fearless approach. Here are 76 of her quotes:

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

Pauline Kael

Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Pauline Kael

A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

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.

Pauline Kael

I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.

Pauline Kael

If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?

Pauline Kael

The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.

Pauline Kael