Pauline Kael Quotes

...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything — even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.

When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

Nobody really controls a production, now; the director is on his own, even if he's insecure, careless, or nuts.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.