A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

Pauline Kael

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

Pauline Kael

appreciate littles art

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

Pauline Kael

fool artist firsts

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.

Pauline Kael

feet doors needs

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

Pauline Kael

virtuous tests feels

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Pauline Kael

loner definitions hero

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

Pauline Kael

movie couple baby

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

Pauline Kael

minorities want-something art

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

Pauline Kael

stupid believe dirty

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

Pauline Kael

desperation movie finals

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

Pauline Kael

movie kissing italian

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.

Pauline Kael

program tvs television

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Pauline Kael

movie expression art

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

Pauline Kael

punching males thinking

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Pauline Kael

trash appetite art

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

Pauline Kael

this-generation generations political

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

Pauline Kael

critical tasks people

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

Pauline Kael

movie care believe

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.

Pauline Kael

romance dream people

If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies.

Pauline Kael

senses movie ifs

It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

Pauline Kael

depressing mean art