Pauline Kael Quotes - Page 2

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

We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images.

It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

Her only flair is in her nostrils.

Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

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

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

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

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

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.

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

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies.

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.

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

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.

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.

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.

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

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