Pauline Kael Quotes

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

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

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

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.

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.

What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

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

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

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

I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.

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.

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.

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

An artist must either give up art or develop.

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

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