A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise. The movie is a popular melodrama with its roots in the gangster films of the 30s, but it expresses a new tragic realism, and it’s altogether extraordinary.
Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. Since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.
Boorman doesn’t bother with episodes that don’t stir him; there’s no dull connective tissue. The film is like Flaubert’s more exotic fantasies—one lush, enraptured scene after another.
The Elephant Man is a very pleasurable surprise. Though I had seen Eraserhead, which is the only other feature directed by David Lynch, and had thought him a true original, I wasn’t prepared for the strength he would bring out of understatement.
Bergman is not a playful dreamer, as we already know from nightmarish films like The Silence, which seems to take place in a trance. He apparently thinks in images and links them together to make a film.
The movie works because it has the Mary Shelley story to lean on: we know that the monster will be created and will get loose. And Brooks makes a leap up as a director because, although the comedy doesn’t build, he carries the story through.
Throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of Part II, there are so many moments of epiphany — mysterious, reverberant images, such as the small Vito singing in his cell — that one scarcely has the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film.
La Grande Illusion is a perceptive study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during World War I.
by Pauline Kael In Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, the towers and spires of a medieval castle rise high in the air right out of the
Buñuel attacks the Church as the perverter and frustrater of man—the power trying to hold down sexuality, animality, irrationality, man’s “instinctual nature.’’
The movie—Costner’s debut as a director—is childishly naïve. When Lieutenant Dunbar is alone with his pet wolf, he’s like Robinson Crusoe on Mars. When he tries to get to know the Sioux, and he and they are feeling each other out, it’s like a sci-fi film that has the hero trying to communicate with an alien race.
John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is largely just a matter of the camera tracking subjectively from the mad killer’s point of view.
In this interview, conducted by Sue Mathews, Pauline Kael discusses recent Australian films and, not surprisingly, offers some startling opinions.
Pauline Kael reviews Oliver Stone’s ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ (1989). Published in The New Yorker, January 22, 1990
Pauline Kael’s review of ‘Dead Poets Society’ (1989) by Peter Weir
Pauline Kael reviews Tim Burton’s Batman. Publishe in The New Yorker, July 10, 1989
The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972
When you come out of the theatre after seeing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, you certainly know that you’ve seen something. You wouldn’t mistake frames from Blue Velvet for frames from any other movie. It’s an anomaly—the work of a genius naif.
Bergman’s movies have almost always had some kind of show within the show: a ballet, a circus, a magic show, a bit of animation, many pieces of plays and even whole plays. In Persona, as in the very early Prison, Bergman involves us in the making of a movie.
This mediocre movie seems destined to be a tidal wave of a hit. Spielberg, who was perhaps the greatest of all pure, escapist movie directors, is being acclaimed for turning into a spiritual simp.
by Pauline Kael At the end of The Godfather Part II (1974), the story was complete—beautifully complete. Francis Ford Coppola knew it, and for over
by Pauline Kael Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas has a lift. It’s like Raging Bull, except that it’s not domineering. It’s like Raging Bull made in a
Shoeshine, written by Cesare Zavattini, is a social protest film that rises above its purpose. It is a lyric study of how two boys betrayed by society betray each other and themselves
Pauline Kael reviews “Planet of the Apes”, a 1968 science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Published in ‘The New Yorker’, February 17, 1968
Pauline Kael reviews Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Published in ‘The New Yorker’, March 2, 1968
Pauline Kael’s review of ‘Superman’ (1978). Published in ‘The New Yorker’, January 1, 1979
Pauline Kael reviews George Lucas’ Star Wars. Published in ‘The New Yorker’, September 26, 1977
No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying.
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