ONE
There are some film critics I read to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing and, perhaps, to get some idea of how I might approach a particular film. Over the last 25 years or so, the movie critic I have found most helpful in that regard is David Edelstein. I used to love reading his reviews at slate.com, and he often had a real influence over whether I would end up going to see a movie.
But there are other reasons you might be drawn to film critics. I have never read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker to decide whether to see a film. I read him instead for the wit, the charm, the flair. Only Lane could write this of the titular figure of the 1999 film The Mummy, “If you made a nourishing winter soup out of white beans and Terminator, this fellow is what you would find at the bottom of the pot.”
And then there’s a third set of film critics I turn to, this one consisting of three remarkable writers: James Agee, David Thomson, and Pauline Kael. These three I admire for the quality of their sensibility, the intelligence and the passionate attention that they bring to—well, first, to watching movies, and only then to writing about them. It doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.
I have some especially strong disagreements with David Thomson. Some of his judgments are completely alien to my own. He loves some things that do nothing for me—primarily the work of The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), which Martin Scorsese adores as well. So the fact I get nothing out of those movies probably says more about me than it does about them. Still, anything David Thomson writes about Powell and Pressburger I’m eager to read. Conversely, he intensely dislikes Billy Wilder, whom he thinks of as sour and cynical. He doesn’t think Billy Wilder is bad, but he thinks his screenplays and especially the movies that he directs are marred by cynicism. I think that’s a total misreading of Billy Wilder, but, again, I’ll read everything that Thomson says about him—or any other artist, for that matter.
Maybe because he was a novelist and poet as well as screenwriter himself, I have a particular love for James Agee and his way of registering complicated responses, mixed feelings. I especially delight in his review of The Best Years of our Lives (1946): “At its worst,” he writes, “this story is very annoying in its patness, its timidity, its slithering attempts to pretend to face and by that pretense to dodge in the most shameful way possible its own fullest meanings and possibilities.” He goes on in this dismissive vein for some time: “In fact,” he writes, “it would be possible, I don’t doubt, to call the whole picture just one long pious piece of deceit and self-deceit, embarrassed by hot flashes of talent, conscience, truthfulness, and dignity.” But then, at the end of the review, he admits that he absolutely adored The Best Years of Our Lives and promises to write his next essay to explain why. That sort of investment of himself in watching movies, paying attention not only to the movies but also to what the movies do to him, how they affect him, and then writing vividly and precisely about the quality of his experience in the movie theater—all of that is simply extraordinary.
Indeed, the only writer I find who can outdo Agee in that respect is Pauline Kael. I should add that Kael is completely useless to me as a guide to movies. If she loves something, I might love it or I might hate it. If she hates something, well, same thing. It’s not that we necessarily have opposing responses or opposing ideas. I simply cannot reliably map what I see at the movies onto what she sees.
But that is not the point. I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee—brings the whole of herself to writing about movies. And so the best way to think about Kael’s writing is not as movie film criticism; that would be a category error. She wrote in a known genre, but not that genre, whether she knew it or not.
TWO
Pauline Kael was not a nice person and probably not a good person. She was, many have reported, intolerant of dissent from her favored positions and persons, and, conversely, inclined to reward the sycophancy of younger critics, some of whom came to be called “the Paulettes.” Her fellow film critic Richard Schickel summed her up thus:
Her breathy, noisy presence in screening rooms, where she was hell to sit next to, and in personal appearances and on TV, where she could be counted on to attack a fellow critic who did not, for example, share her enthusiasm for Jean-Luc Godard’s lesser works, would cause sharp intakes in breath from the audience. Very simply, she was a kind of performance artist, both on the page and in her presence, always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes.
In writing her book on Citizen Kane she undoubtedly stole ideas and information from a film scholar named Howard Suber, ideas and information extracted from him with the promise—a promise she surely never intended to keep—that she would name him as the co-author of anything she wrote about Kane.
If you ask anyone who Pauline Kael was, and they happen to know, they’ll tell you she was a film critic, someone who wrote for magazines, someone who cranked out her assessments on a regular schedule. However, by any reasonable criterion she did that job poorly. Her judgments were as arbitrary as they were high-handed; her capriciousness was matched only by her imperiousness. The very traits that earned her praise for one movie earned her condemnation for another. She was the sort of writer who regularly gets called “pugilistic.” Schickel complained that “Kael had no theoretical basis for her opinions.” After she panned the film Shoah, Leon Wieseltier dismissed her in no uncertain terms: “Pauline Kael is a moral idiot.”
All these criticisms of her person and her work are true but, I submit, irrelevant. Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her “reviews” was a chapter in her autobiography—an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions. For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life. And as an autobiographer she was a truly major writer, the Karl Ove Knausgård of her time and place—only more expansive and infinitely more interesting. If you were to put her decades of writing about movies between two covers, you’d have something quite a bit larger than Knausgård’s six volumes, and something that could with greater justice be called My Struggle. Her struggle, and also her nation’s, because she was also the chronicler of the several generations of Americans who found themselves, or lost themselves, at the movies.
We may begin to find the key to her greatness, I think, if we return to something Richard Schickel said: “she was a kind of performance artist, both on the page and in her presence, always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes.” That’s true, I think, but one can give it a valence that Schickel declines to give it. We’re helped by noting a point that Sanford Schwartz, in his introduction to a collection of Kael’s writing on movies, identifies:
What gives Kael a distinctive place in American writing, however, has as much to do with what movies prompt in her as it does with her capturing so much of the breadth and lore of movies. Following through on her conviction that movies release us from our normal emotional and social guardedness, she built her criticism, whether her subject is an epochal masterpiece or a tinny Hollywood product, on her most spontaneous and sensory reactions.
And then, making the point that led me to conceive of this essay, Schwartz writes:
In a body of work that as a result sometimes has the impact of a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography, she immerses us in a flow of dazzlingly stated, unpredictable, sometimes needling and exhortatory, and always humanly large and forthright perceptions.
That is to say: Kael was “always shifting our attention to the drama of her thought processes” because she was writing “a single long, indirect, and utterly original kind of autobiography.” And because she was an American of her generation, that autobiography could be told only through the experience of movies. One should think of her millions of words of movie reviews not as movie reviews but rather as chapters in her own story. Schickel says that “in a sense, she practiced criticism in much the same way that audiences leaving the theater after a film practice it. ‘I liked it,’ we say, or ‘I hated it.’” He means this point as a critique; it is better seen as the key to her importance as an autobiographer.
What Kael’s autobiography centers on, I argue, is mixed emotions—a confused and ultimately irresolvable complex of responses to the story that the movies present to us—the story about our lives, especially as Americans, but really as citizens, or inmates, of the twentieth century. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) she wrote, is “a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe in it even if we didn’t.” Wanting to believe but not quite believing; questioning and doubting and yet also affirming and celebrating—this is Kael’s constant experience of the movies, and of being an American. The two experiences are, effectively, one. And now that her weekly schedule, and in many cases the movies she wrote about, have receded safely into the past, we have a chance to see her real achievement and value it for what it is.
THREE
According to a common story, the gods Apollo and Dionysos occupied the temple at Delphi—but never at the same time. Dionysos was present throughout the winter, but Apollo returned each spring. Likewise, for eleven years, from 1968 to 1979, the New Yorker had two movie critics: Pauline Kael wrote reviews in autumn and winter, Penelope Gilliatt in spring and summer. But in August of 1989 Kael made an early return to her reviewer’s perch. Something urgent demanded it. She began her column thus:
Some movies—Grand Illusion and Shoeshine come to mind, and the two Godfathers and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and The Night of the Shooting Stars—can affect us in more direct, emotional ways than simple entertainment movies. They have more imagination, more poetry, more intensity than the usual fare; they have large themes, and a vision. They can leave us feeling simultaneously elated and wiped out. Overwhelmed, we may experience a helpless anger if we hear people mock them or poke holes in them to dismiss them. The new Casualties of War has this kind of purity. If you meet people who are bored by movies you love such as The Earrings of Madame de… or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, chances are you can brush it off and think it’s their loss. But this new film is the kind that makes you feel protective. When you leave the theatre, you’ll probably find that you’re not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything.
The three most important words in this passage are, in order of appearance, “us,” “we,” and “you,” and what’s important about them is that they all mean “I.” Through those distancing pronouns, those apparent references to her readers or to moviegoers more generally, Kael is telling us who she is, what happens to her when she watches movies, and why she writes about them.
The film that prompted this mini-manifesto was Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, which was based on a long article of the same title by Daniel Lang that appeared in the New Yorker in October of 1969, and soon thereafter in book form. Lang’s article is based on an account given by an American soldier, Robert Storeby, about his fellow soldiers’ rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman named Phan Thi Mao in 1966. (Storeby, who was given a pseudonym by Lang for the article and a different pseudonym in the movie, died in his native Minnesota in 2026.) The four rapists were convicted, largely on Storeby’s evidence, and dishonorably discharged from the Army, but their punishments were derisory or nonexistent: Even the soldier who repeatedly stabbed Phan Thi Mao and then shot her in the head with an M-16 was out of prison by mid-1970.
Kael offers a proper critical view of the film—for instance, while commending De Palma’s direction, she laments the way that David Rabe’s screenplay transforms the thoughtful, articulate account of Storeby into the “stumbling thoughts of a folksy, subliterate fellow reaching for truth”—but she thinks that “De Palma has such seductive, virtuosic control of film craft that he can express convulsions in the unconscious.” Indeed, she repeatedly emphasizes this point: “De Palma works directly on our emotions…what De Palma does with the camera is so powerful that the few times you wince at the dialogue are almost breathers.”
He gets at the reality that may have made some moviegoers too fearful to enjoy themselves. He goes to the heart of sexual victimization, and he does it with a new authority. The way he makes movies now, it’s as if he were saying, “What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?”
But of course this is not the question De Palma confronts his viewers with; it is the question Kael puts to herself. And she answers with her response to the film, which incorporates both cultural memories (the wound that the Vietnam War inflicted on the American psyche) and personal ones (an encounter on a New York street with a man abusing a child). De Palma seeks to rip open the emotions of his viewers, and Kael tells us that she is there for it. In his 1996 book Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? A.D. Nuttall tells us that he asked that question to the poet Craig Raine, and Raine replied: “All emotion is pleasurable.” Casualties of War is absolutely horrifying, Kael tells us, and she is exhilarated by the horror.
The titles of Kael’s collections of reviews—I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies, Reeling, Taking It All In—are often telling: They indicate deep personal investment in the experience of watching movies, and even emotional out-of-control-ness. As David Thomson, who knew Kael late in her life, has written, “She was a sensationalist.… She was passionate about being overwhelmed.” Here, near the end of her career—Kael would retire, largely because of her difficulties with Parkinson’s disease, nineteen months later—Kael wants the world to know, and wants to be able to tell herself, that she is still capable of being overwhelmed, still loses it at the movies. The last piece she published was an introduction to a career-wide collection of her work, which she called For Keeps, and in it she notes that “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”
FOUR
Thomson again: “Here was the wondrous serendipity: that she and a very bright age of film coincided.” He is thinking of the emergence of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s, which Kael famously celebrated with a rave review in the New Yorker of a very controversial film, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Indeed, it was this review, written on spec as a freelance, that landed her a job as a New Yorker staff writer. From that elevated perch she was able to cheer on the new movement, to become its unofficial articulator and defender. When the energy of American cinema began to fade, or rather to be absorbed into an ever-more-encompassing corporate calculus, Kael’s enthusiasm for her job seemed to diminish—which I think is why she was so eager to write about Casualties of War, a film that made her think that her waning enthusiasm was possibly temporary. But illness ended her career before she could find out.
In trying to sum up Kael’s impact, Thomson rightly says that “she established for a while something that had not been true since the impact of television—that the movies were ‘ours,’ that they spoke to and for a society and were the most telling, deeply felt impression of who we were and might be. That may never come again.”
It has not come again, and if when he wrote those words, many years ago, Thomson was saddened by the thought of cinema’s decline, his thoughts have since seemed to undergo an interesting reversal. His most recent book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies (2026), is essentially an extended lamentation, a long regret, that the movies were so important for so long, in Thomson’s own life and in the life of our common culture.
Near the beginning of that book, describing the first days of cinema, Thomson says that “People were going to the flicks because the granular energy of stillness turned into flow was such a kicker.” And this continued to be true. But Thomson thinks that that “kicker” has desensitized and anesthetized us: “We have been waiting for something to happen, and we are idiots…. We are no longer the selves we hoped to be. We are not exactly alive any longer.” And, in the book’s closing words: “Baby, we didn’t care. For a century the fallacy had reigned that watching would make us better. Instead of just indifferent.”
What brought about this profound disillusionment? The answer is simple: the rise to power of Donald Trump. Trump dominates the last part of this book, and Thomson fears that the movies, by habituating us to watching, always watching, made us “idiots”—and that allowed Trump to emerge. Early in his career Thomson wrote a book about the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writer Laurence Sterne, and dotted throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light are moments of regret (Thomson is now 85) that he didn’t spend more of his time on books:
In any book there is that spacing and the room it leaves for your intelligence. It’s not that books are slack or indolent. But in comparison they help us feel the adolescent, narrow-minded intensity of film. Its blinding concentration is awed into submission or obedience. What film does not grasp is the largeness of imagination. Just because it was so accessible for those unwilling to read does not mean we should give up on reading. Or let it be betrayed.
But I suspect if Thomson had become a literary critic he would now be lamenting the ways that literary criticism had contributed to the rise of Trump.
In any event, Thomson thinks that the habit of watching and watching, idiotically captured by screens, remains with us, but the movies don’t matter anymore, not as they did to Kael and her contemporaries. In the year of her birth, D.W. Griffith released Broken Blossoms; in the year of her death the first Harry Potter movie appeared. For most of the years in between, cinema was the dominant medium through which people experienced and interpreted the world.
Things have changed. In 2022 the French filmmaker Audrey Diwan reflected on the ways that her teenage children find her own films inaccessible, preferring the “satisfaction” they derive from watching “reels,” the short-form videos so popular on social media. Netflix and other TV production companies explicitly commission “second screen” experiences that don’t demand the full attention of viewers. Barbenheimer Summer was fun, but in such a media environment who is reeling? Who is taking it all in?
Pauline Kael is the great recorder of the Age of Cinema as well as its best phenomenologist: She tells us in vivid, compelling prose what it felt like to lose it at the movies. But when a writer’s distinctive excellences are so closely tied to one medium, can that writer’s reputation survive the decline of that medium—especially when it was so outrageously dominant? A memoir like Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built (2002) will always be compelling, and not just because people will always read books, but also because it was and is unusual for children to be built by books. Kael’s story, by contrast, is not merely about the woman that movies built but, even more, the world that movies built. When that world has passed into history, will anyone be able to see just how extraordinary a writer Pauline Kael was?
