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“... His extracurricular education continued at Berkeley, where a circle of female friends including Pauline Kael taught him the byways of modernist poetry and leftist politics. He joined the campus literary magazine and discovered there ‘a stubbornness that should’ve told me I was going to be able to hold out for the rest of my life’. Poor grades, a ...”

“... extent to which we are happy to surrender to the bear-like embrace of Moore’s onscreen persona. Pauline Kael wasn’t. In her New Yorker review of Roger and Me, she called it ‘a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing’. Uncharmed by this ‘big shambling joker in windbreaker and baseball cap’, she complained: ‘I had ...”

“... Peter Bogdanovich and Olivier Assayas. ‘He thinks not like a director but like an actor,’ Pauline Kael wrote, and the remark was not intended as praise. But Kael was aware that what can be said against Cassavetes can also be said for him: Cassavetes’s method is peculiar in that its triumphs and its failures ...”

“... to be ashamed of that, and it is not necessarily a disqualifying fault even for a film critic. Pauline Kael developed a tremendous reputation without having very many clues about how films got put together. But even Kael was aware that actors don’t usually write their own dialogue. Sometimes they are so good at ...”

“... Wind and Roman Holiday. He helped create the gangster movie, the screwball comedy and film noir. Pauline Kael credited him with being responsible for half of the most enjoyable Hollywood movies; Jean- Luc Godard went further: Hecht, he said, ‘invented 80 per cent of what is used in Hollywood movies today’.A Child of the Century, Hecht’s ...”

“... Perfect, Thomson, aged sixtyish, compares a non-exhaustive list of the movies available for Pauline Kael to review in the 1970s with those reviewed in the New Yorker by Lane, aged between 30 and 40. Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather (1 & 2), The Conversation, McCabe and Mrs Miller, California Split, Nashville, Chinatown, The ...”

“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... Citizen Kane, ‘it is at least possible that this is the very point that Welles wants to make.’ Pauline Kael seems to have had something like this in mind when she described the film as ‘a shallow masterpiece’ (Thomson thinks of cinema as shallow in any case, and Welles’s masterpiece as ‘the first movie to reveal that’). Despite the verve and ...”

“... was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put it, he became ‘the leading exponent of the dictates-of-conscience and the dignity-and-indomitable-spirit-of-man school of screenwriter’ and is probably best remembered for the series of ‘message’ epics that he scripted during this ...”

“... presiding over her own prospective talkshow. Taking part in the pilot were Vidal, the movie critic Pauline Kael, the actor Ed Asner (TV’s Lou Grant), and myself. Before the taping, Vidal and I chatted about the then-hot slander suit involving Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. ‘When you get to a certain age,’ Vidal said almost wistfully, ‘a juicy ...”

“... It’s another kind of exercise. If Last Tango in Paris was startling in 1972, and reminded Pauline Kael of The Rite of Spring, it has dated badly. A venture that was to have a man and woman as raw as figures from Francis Bacon, even doing it on screen, turned into a naked Maria Schneider and a Brando too shy to take his coat off. He looked at his ...”

“... proper mode: film was the trembling reflection of the world in a puddle. The book was derided by Pauline Kael in Sight and Sound. Kracauer, she charged, wasthe sort of man who can’t say ‘It’s a lovely day’ without first establishing that it is day, that the term ‘day’ is meaningless without the dialectical concept of ‘night’, that both ...”

“... added up the totals of aesthetic apparatus, there is still no affective centre in the work.’ Pauline Kael thought much the same: ‘Miss Sontag is often a thoughtful writer, but she has never had much dramatic sense – it’s hard to think of an American writer with less dramatic sense.’ Moser himself, fidgeting around for something useful to ...”

“... a reverie of a gangster movie as students in an espresso bar might remember it or plan it’, Pauline Kael wrote in her review, which describes the film well: The two heroes . . . begin by play-acting crime and violence movies, then really act them out in their lives. Their girl, wanting to be accepted, tells them there is money in the villa where ...”

“... Lorre is distressingly human – ‘a small fat man, sweating in his uncomfortable clothes’, as Pauline Kael wrote. You can almost smell the goulash on his breath, and taste his all too ordinary greed as he sits at a café and gulps down two cognacs, after a mother’s timely arrival has thwarted his intention to kidnap yet another girl outside a ...”