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The New Yorker

PADRE PADRONE: THE SACRED OAK – Review by Pauline Kael

The Taviani brothers have learned to fuse political commitment and artis­tic commitment into stylized passion. Their film Padre Padrone has the beauty of anger that is channelled and disciplined without losing inten­sity.

QUEST FOR FIRE (1981) – Review by Pauline Kael

Eighty thousand years ago, on broad primeval plains, Naoh (Everett McGill), the bravest warrior of the spear-carrying Ulam tribe, and two fellow-warriors, Amoukar (Ron Perlman) and Gaw (Nameer El-Kadi), are sent out on the sacred mission of finding fire and bringing it back to the Ulam.

Mean Streets: Everyday Inferno – Review by Pauline Kael

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emo­tional range that is dizzyingly sensual.

THE GODFATHER: ALCHEMY – Review by Pauline Kael

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

Dirty Harry: Saint Cop – Review by Pauline Kael

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.

Excalibur (1981) – Review by Pauline Kael

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 by David Lynch

The Elephant Man (1980) – Review by Pauline Kael

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.

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974) – Review by Pauline Kael

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.

The Godfather Part II (1974)- Review by Pauline Kael

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.

Dances With Wolves (1990) – Review by Pauline Kael

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.

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