Pauline Kael was an American film critic renowned for her witty, biting, and highly opinionated reviews. She approached movies with deep emotion, employing a distinctively colloquial and personal writing style. Widely regarded as the most influential American film critic of her era, her approach left a significant mark on subsequent generations of critics and profoundly shaped the landscape of film appreciation in America.
The National Society of Film Critics Sound Off on the Hottest Movie Controversies
A collection of essays on the most hotly debated films features discussions on Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, the ratings war, and the war of the sexes by such critics as Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and Terrence Rafferty. Original.
The collection features interviews with renowned film critic Pauline Kael, offering insight into her aesthetics, political views, and critical approach. A notable highlight is the engaging debate between Kael and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The dialogues not only reflect on Kael's influential career but also discuss films she missed reviewing or those released post-retirement in 1991, enriching the understanding of her legacy in film criticism.
A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.
Raising Kane and other Essays offers the best of Pauline Kael's more extended meditations on the movies, including the full text of her controversial account of the making of Citizen Kane, still considered by many to be the greatest motion picture ever made. Her sympathetic and insightful study of the career of Cary Grant, 'The Man From Dream City' appears alongside such prophetic analyses as 'Movies on Television', Fantasies of the Art-House Audience' and the classic 'Trash, Art and the Movies'. This volume also contains the most complete version to date of her landmark dissection of the film industry, 'The Making of The Group'.
