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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1h

[KING KONG] The picture works because, despite what you know, you believe in Kong as a living creature. You feel bad that the ape is killed—but you also feel tickled that you feel bad. (1977)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 3h

[THE ENFORCER] Is it time for Eastwood to turn villain? This drawn, creased face could have a George Macready sinister charm. Or has he gone past that already? (1977)

pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 5h

Jessica Lange has a facial structure that the camera yearns for, and she has talent, too...There is nothing of the usual actress's phoniness in her work. (1982)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 7h

Depardieu redeems physical coarseness; he's both earth and spirit, like the peasants in a Piero della Francesca. (1977)

pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 19h

LOVE AND ANARCHY (1973)

The movie is uneven; it often seems like a silent film, and sometimes it is extravagant and operatic. But when Wertmüller concentrates on the whores' faces and attitudes it can be very beautiful.

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 21h

[RE-ANIMATOR] These scenes are like pop Buñuel...The jokes hit you in a subterranean comic zone that the surrealists' pranks sometimes reached, but without the surrealists' self-consciousness (and art-consciousness). (1985)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 23h

Jean Renoir has often said that when a movie spells everything out, the public has "nothing to add" and there's no "collaboration." (1974)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

I know that I've failed in some of these reviews—dismissing big, bludgeoning movies without realizing how much they might mean to people, rejecting humid sentiment and imagining that no one could be affected by it. (1976)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

BEAT THE DEVIL is a mess, but it's probably the funniest mess—the screwball classic—of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way by finding a style of its own. (1967)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

[POPEYE] Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit into it. Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with, and working from that, goes way past it. (1980)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, we want more from movies than we get from the usual commercial entertainments, but would anybody use terms like mature, adult, and sober for THE RULES OF THE GAME or BREATHLESS or CITIZEN KANE or JULES AND JIM? (1967)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Montgomery Clift has the control to charm—almost to seduce—an audience without ever stepping outside his inflexible, none-too-smart character. Burt Lancaster has a role that's just about perfectly in his range as Sergeant Warden.

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

George Segal seems to be one of the few actors to find their challenge in acting, and he gives his roles solidity and some human weight—the way Spencer Tracy did but without Tracy's boring pugnacity. (1971)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 1d

What makes a "Western" is no longer the wide open spaces but the presence of men like John Wayne, James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster, grinning with their big new choppers, sucking their guts up into their chests, and hauling themselves onto horses. (1967)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

Ken Russell seems almost cursed by his subjects; he seems to want something from them, but each time he gets close to them he dances away. His movies are charged with sex, but it's androgynous sex, and sterile. (1972)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

[Jane Campion] She does have a gift for imagery. But she's totally arbitrary, in an art-school way. Things don't hang together in her movies. The symbolism never registers fully, because you can't tell what she's symbolizing, though you know damn well it's symbolic. (1994)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies; I don't trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn't need to find their way through trash. (1969)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

[THE BETSY] Laurence Olivier, who plays the superabundantly sexed patriarch of an automobile dynasty, stands out with startling boldness, and one begins to perceive the secret of his greatness: Laurence Olivier dares to be foolish. (1978)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

LOS OLVIVADOS (1951)

Buñuel treats his characters pitilessly, not as ideas, but as morally responsible human beings; there is little of the social workers' cant that makes everyone responsible for juvenile crimes except the juveniles.

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

But Kazan used to know how to help us feel. Perhaps he undervalues that gift, but it's his only true one. Is it really a penance for a big movie director to try to think small? In movies, the worst sellout has always been thinking big. (1969)

pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 2d

Using women (and not only women) as plot functions may be a clue to the shallowness of many movies, even of much better movies—AMERICAN GRAFFITI, for example. (1973)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 3d

That could be [Schrader's] swindling genius; he's a propagandist without a cause. In puritan tones, he tells us that the world is an ugly place and you can't change a thing. If you stick up your head, they chop it off. (1978)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 3d

THE GRADUATE isn’t a bad movie, it’s entertaining, though in a fairly slick way (the audience is just about programmed for laughs). What’s surprising is that so many people take it so seriously. (1969)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 3d

There's nothing under PULP FICTION, no serious undercurrents. And I didn't find any of the important "statements" I had read about in the reviews, but it's got a crazy good humor. Tarantino has a flair for pop dialogue, and a flair for casting. He used wonderful people. (1994)

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pauline kael bot @paulinekaelbot.bsky.social · 3d

In his book on Hitchcock, whenever Hitchcock explains how something was calculated to tease and please the audience, Truffaut interprets the explanation as if this were the meaning of art. It can, however, be the meaning of commerce, and of emptiness. (1969)

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