Pauline Kael

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The New York Times, The New Yorker
For 828 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 26% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 72% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Pauline Kael's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 The Lavender Hill Mob
Lowest review score: 10 Revolution
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 372 out of 828
  2. Mixed: 406 out of 828
  3. Negative: 50 out of 828
828 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    Used Cars
    A classic screwball fantasy - a neglected modern comedy that's like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures...Set in the world of competing used-car dealers in the booming Southwest, this picture has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness; it's an American tall-tale movie in a Pop Art form. The premise is that honesty doesn't exist; if you develop a liking for some of the characters, it's not because they're free of avarice but because of their style of avarice.
    • The New Yorker
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    The Trip to Bountiful
    Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.
    • The New Yorker
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    Witness for the Prosecution
    Billy Wilder's inane yet moderately entertaining version of an Agatha Christie courtroom thriller, with Charles Laughton wiggling his wattles.
    • The New Yorker
    • 83 Metascore
    • 30 Pauline Kael
    Network
    He hardly bothers with the characters; the movie is a ventriloquial harrangue. He thrashes around in messianic God-love booziness, driving each scene to an emotional peak.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    Shoeshine
    It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium.
    • The New Yorker
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    Hamburger Hill
    Most of the power of this scrupulously honest memorial isn't in the talk; it's in the terror and the foreignness - the far-from-home-ness - of the imagery. Directed by John Irvin, the film has great decency; it joins together terror and thoughtfulness.
    • The New Yorker
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Pauline Kael
    Revolution
    This is a certifiably loony picture; it's so bad it puts you in a state of shock.
    • The New Yorker
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    To Have and Have Not
    Slickly professional, thoroughly enjoyable.
    • The New Yorker
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Pauline Kael
    Lili
    Mel Ferrer smiles his narcissistic, masochistic smiles as the crippled puppeteer who can speak his love to the 16-year-old orphan girl Lili (Leslie Caron) only through his marionettes. Canon is much too good for him, but the movie doesn't know it.
    • The New Yorker
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    Breathless
    The film is light and playful and off-the-cuff, even a little silly. Yet the giddy, gauche characters who don't give a damn...are not only familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive.
    • The New Yorker
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Pauline Kael
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    One of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial. I think people will really fight about it. It's the story of a woman who has a second chance thrust on her; she knows enough not to make the same mistake again, but she isn't sure of much else. Neither is the movie. Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don't believe in what's going on--when the issues it raises get all fouled up. [13 Jan 1975, p.74]
    • The New Yorker
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Pauline Kael
    Chariots of Fire
    The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.
    • The New Yorker
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Pauline Kael
    A Fine Madness
    Uneven and it has unresolved areas, but it also has a 60s charge to it.
    • The New Yorker
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Pauline Kael
    Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Made in a documentary manner as styled as a Hollywood musical, the movie is hyperconscious of art, of politics, of itself, and at times it's exasperatingly affectless.
    • The New Yorker
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    After the Thin Man
    It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.
    • The New Yorker
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    Frankenstein
    Probably the most famous of all horror films, and one of the best.
    • The New Yorker
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Pauline Kael
    Carrie
    The best scary-funny movie since "Jaws" - a teasing, terrifying, lyrical shocker, directed by Brian De Palma, who has the wickedest baroque sensibility at large in American movies. Pale, gravel-voiced Sissy Spacek gives a classic chameleon performance as a repressed high-school senior.
    • The New Yorker
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Pauline Kael
    Marooned
    A space epic with a horse-and-buggy script. It's dull out there in space, though not as depressing as listening to the astronauts' wives back home. John Sturges directed, in his sleep
    • The New Yorker
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    Lifeboat
    Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.
    • The New Yorker
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Pauline Kael
    East of Eden
    It’s far from a dull movie, but it’s certainly a very strange one; it’s an enshrinement of the mixed-up kid. Here and in Rebel Without a Cause, Dean seems to go just about as far as anybody can in acting misunderstood.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Pauline Kael
    The Seventh Seal
    A magically powerful film.
    • The New Yorker
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    His Girl Friday
    Russell is at her comedy peak here...and as Walter Burns, Grant raises mugging to a joyful art.
    • The New Yorker
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Pauline Kael
    Cutter's Way
    The film is packed with symbolic gestures, though they're not quite as effective as the ghostly fiesta scene behind the opening titles, with senoritas dancing to music that's different from the music we hear, and castanets silently clicking.
    • The New Yorker
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    Cat Ballou
    Mainly it's full of sort-of-funny and trying-to-be-funny ideas. The director Elliot Silverstein's spoofy tone is ineptitude, coyly disguised.
    • The New Yorker
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    The Man Who Would Be King
    It's a wonderfully full and satisfying movie, with superb performances by Connery and Caine.
    • The New Yorker
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Pauline Kael
    Tex
    This adaptation of one of the S.E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film's look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic.
    • The New Yorker
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Pauline Kael
    The Goodbye Girl
    The forced snappiness of the exchanges suggests two woodpeckers clicking at each other's heads. Irritability provides the rhythm in Neil Simon's universe.
    • The New Yorker
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Pauline Kael
    The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    This is one of Preston Sturges's surreal-slapstick-satire-conniption-fit comedies, and part of our great crude heritage.
    • The New Yorker
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Pauline Kael
    Aliens
    An inflated sci-fi action-horror film...[Cameron] does it in an energetic, systematic, relentless way, with an action dicretor's gusto, and a shortage of imagination. The imagery has a fair amount of graphic power, but there's too much claustrophobic blue-green darkness.
    • The New Yorker
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Pauline Kael
    The Stunt Man
    A virtuoso piece of kinetic moviemaking. Working with material that could, with a few false steps, have turned into a tony reality-and-illusion puzzle, the director, Richard Rush, has kept it all rowdy and funny -- it's slapstick metaphysics.
    • The New Yorker
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