15 of Pauline Kael’s Greatest Takes

Pauline Kael, perhaps the most passionate and formative of all American film critics, was able to transform 20th century cinema with just the power of her typewriter. Singular and uncompromising, Kael first established herself as a major voice when she went against consensus and authored a revelatory 7,000-word rave of “Bonnie and Clyde” for The New Yorker in the fall of 1967; she was hired to the staff of the magazine the following year, and spent the next decade exerting her will on a medium that wasn’t yet sure what to make of itself. 

Kael died in 2001, but her legacy continues to live on. In honor of what would have been the critic’s 100th birthday, New York’s Quad Cinema has programmed a massive, 25-film celebration of her life and work. “Losing It at the Moives: Pauline Kael at 100,” which runs from June 7 to June 20, consists of some of the movies that Kael helped elevate into the canon (“Nashville,” “The Story of Adele H.”) as well as some of the movies that made their way there despite Kael’s best efforts to bring them down to Earth (“Chloe in the Afternoon”). The lineup spans Kael’s entire career, from her writing in The New Yorker to the books she wrote as a free agent following her brief stint in Hollywood. 

Click through this gallery to read Kael’s most striking quotes on 15 of the films she helped to shape. 

“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967)

“‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is the most excitingly American American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ […] The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.” — The New Yorker

“‘Bonnie and Clyde’ keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance—it holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they’re not stooges—that they appreciate the joke—when they catch the first bullet right in the face. The movie keeps them off balance to the end… Instead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn’t need to feel or care, that it’s all just in fun, that ‘we were only kidding,’ ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ disrupts us with ‘And you thought we were only kidding.'” — 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“Chloe in the Afternoon” (1972)

“Eric Rohmer’s ‘Chloe in the Afternoon,’ which opened the New York Film Festival, will probably be called a perfect film, and in a way I suppose it is, but it had evaporated a half hour after I saw it. It’s about as forgettable as a movie can be.

Maybe Rohmer, who has become a specialist in the eroticism of non-sexual affairs, has diddled over a small idea too long; perhaps intentionally (but who can be sure?), this is a reductio ad absurdum. The will-he-or-won’t-he game (an intellectualized version of the plight of Broadway virgins) goes on so long that the squeamish hero must be meant to be an ass.” — Reeling (1976)

“The Godfather Part II (1974)

“The whole picture is informed with such a complex sense of the intermingling of good and evil — and of the inability to foresee the effects of our love upon our children — that it may be the most passionately felt epic ever made in this country.

Talia Shire has such beauty and strength that she commands attention. It’s possible that she didn’t impose herself more strongly in the first film because Coppola, through a kind of reverse nepotism (Miss Shire is his sister), deemphasized her role and didn’t give her many closeups, but this time — pinched, strident, whory — she comes through as a stunningly controlled actress.

It’s as if the movie satisfied an impossible yet basic human desire to see what our parents were like before we were born and to see what they did that affected what we became — not to hear about it, or to read about it, as we can in novels, but actually to see it. It really is like the past recaptured.” — Reeling (1976)

“Hannah and her Sisters” (1986)

“All the vital vulgarity of Woody Allen’s early movies has been drained away here, as it was in ‘Interiors,’ but this time he’s made the picture halfway human. (People can laugh and feel morally uplifted at the same time.) The willed sterility of his style is terrifying to think about; the picture is all tasteful touches, and there’s an element of cultural self-approval in its tone, and a trace of smugness in its narrow concern for family and friends. He uses style to blot out the rest of New York City. It’s a form of repression, and, from the look of the movie, repression is what’s romantic to him.” — 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

“Jaws” (1975)

“In ‘Jaws,’ which may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made, the disasters don’t come on schedule the way they do in most disaster pictures, and your guts never settle down to a timetable. Even while you’re convulsed with laughter, you’re still apprehensive, because the editing rhythms are very tricky, and the shock images loom up huge, right on top of you. There are parts of ‘Jaws’ that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach — if he’d given in to the bourgeois child in himself.” — When the Lights Go Down (1980)

“Last Tango in Paris” (1972)

“[T]he physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening.” — Reeling (1976)

“Realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen — that’s what Bertolucci and Brando achieve.” — Reeling (1976)

“Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?” – Reeling (1976)

“Nashville” (1975)

“Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers — but an orgy without excess? At Robert Altman’s new, almost-three-hour film, ‘Nashville,’ you don’t get drunk on images, you’re not overpowered — you get elated. I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you.

‘Nashville’ is the funniest epic version of America ever to reach the screen.” — Reeling (1976)

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975)

“‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is a powerful, smashingly effective movie — not a great movie but one that will probably stir audiences’ emotions and join the ranks of such pop-mythology films as ‘The Wild One,’ ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ and ‘Easy Rider.’

Forman is an intelligent, tentative director — which is another way of saying that his virtues are largely negative. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one hell of a good film, but it works emotionally only because of its story and acting; it lacks the excitement of movie art.” – When the Lights Go Down (1980)

“Shampoo” (1975)

“Some ideas for films are promising, some are cocksure audacious, but a film about the movie colony featuring the lives of the rich, beautiful women who have a yen for their handsome hairdresser is such a yummy idea that it almost sounds like something a smart porno filmmaker would come up with.

‘Shampoo’ isn’t about the bondage of romantic pursuit, it’s about the bondage of the universal itch among a group primed to scratch. Ready and waiting, the characters keep all possibilities open.” — Reeling (1976)

“Something Wild” (1986)

“The script […] is like working out of a young man’s fantasy of the pleasures and punishments of shucking off middle-class behavior patterns. The movie is about getting high on anarchic, larcenous behaviour and then being confronted with ruthless, sadistic criminality. This rough-edged comedy turns into a scary slapstick thriller. The score — it was put together by John Cale and Laurie Anderson — has a life of its own that gives the movie a buzzing vitality. This is a party movie with both a dark and a light side.” — Hooked (1989)

“The Story of Adele H.” (1975)

“‘Adele H.’ is damnably intelligent — almost frighteningly so, like some passages in Russian novels which strip the characters bare. And it’s deeply, disharmoniously funny — which Truffaut has never been before. The film is concrete, simple, literal, yet it all works on a metaphorical level. It’s an intense, daring vision of the passions that women have kept hidden under a meek exterior.

Truffaut is romantic and ironic: he understands that maybe the only way we can take great romantic love now is as craziness, and that the craziness doesn’t cancel out the romanticism — it completes it. Adele’s love isn’t corrupted by sanity; she’s a great crazy. 

Victor Hugo is said to have had no equal as a poseur and a mythmaker, but, on Truffaut’s evidence, his daughter, who lived to eighty-five, burning with faith to the end, may have surpassed him.” — When the Lights Go Down (1980)

“Taxi Driver” (1976)

“This film doesn’t operate on the level of moral judgment of what Travis does. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk. And it’s a real slap in the face for us when we see Travis at the end looking pacified. He’s got the rage out of his system—for the moment, at least—and he’s back at work, picking up passengers in front of the St. Regis. It’s not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is.” — The New Yorker (1976)

“Scorsese’s New York is the big city of the thrillers he feasted his imagination on — but at a later stage of decay. This New York is a voluptuous enemy. The street vapors become ghostly; Sport the pimp romancing his baby whore leads her in a hypnotic dance; the porno theatres are like mortuaries; the congested traffic is macabre. And this Hell is always in movement.” — When the Lights Go Down (1980)

“The Warriors” (1979)

“Walter Hill’s spectacle takes its story from Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’ and its style from the taste of the modern urban dispossessed—in neon signs, graffiti, and the thrill of gaudiness. The film enters into the spirit of urban-male tribalism and the feelings of kids who believe that they own the streets because they keep other kids out of them. In this vision, cops and kids are all there is, and the worst crime is to be chicken. The movie is like visual rock, and it’s bursting with energy.” — The New Yorker

“Weekend” (1967)

“Only the title of Jean-Luc Godard’s new film is casual and innocent; ‘Weekend’ is the most powerful mystical movie since ‘The Seventh Seal’ and ‘Fires on the Plain’ and passages of Kurosawa. We are hardly aware of the magnitude of the author-director’s conception until after we are caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and becoming more nearly inescapable, like ‘Journey to the End of the Night.’

When Godard is viciously funny, he’s on top of things, and he scores and scores, and illuminates as he scores. When he becomes didactic, we can see that he really doesn’t know anymore about what should be done than the rest of us. The more ‘direct’ Godard is, the more fuzzy and obscure he is. Who can assimilate and evaluate this chunk of theory thrown at us in the middle of a movie? Probably most of us blank out on it.

[W]hen it comes to Godard you can only follow and be destroyed. Other filmmakers see the rashness and speed and flamboyance of his complexity; they’re conscious of it all the time, and they love it, and of course, they’re right to love it. But they can’t walk behind him. They’ve got to find other ways, because he’s burned up the ground.” — Going Steady (1970)

“The Wild Bunch” (1969)

“The bloody deaths are voluptuous, frightening, beautiful. Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle; his story is too simple for this imagist epic. And it’s no accident that you feel a sense of loss for each killer of the Bunch: Peckinpah has made them seem heroically, mythically alive on the screen.” — The New Yorker