Pauline Kael Movie Quotations

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

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

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.

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.

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

When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.

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

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.

tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

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?

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

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.