Rating: 
Summary: Excellent overview
Review: As someone who is just beginning to explore the classics, I love being able to see what Pauline Kael thought about many of the most important movies of our time. Since I often agree with her, it helps me save time and money in determining which movies I want to rent (and if not available to rent, buy). All movie titles are in alphabetical order, and there is an index in the back which contains film titles, directors, actors, etc.However, the capsule reviews can occasionally be misleading. From the capsules, I thought Pauline liked (or at least didn't dislike) "8 1/2" by Fellini and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" by Resnais. But in her book "I Lost It At The Movies", the full reviews are a pretty harsh pan. I also wish that she had a "Best Movies" list. Nevertheless, still a very useful (but thick) book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent overview
Review: As someone who is just beginning to explore the classics, I love being able to see what Pauline Kael thought about many of the most important movies of our time. Since I often agree with her, it helps me save time and money in determining which movies I want to rent (and if not available to rent, buy). All movie titles are in alphabetical order, and there is an index in the back which contains film titles, directors, actors, etc. However, the capsule reviews can occasionally be misleading. From the capsules, I thought Pauline liked (or at least didn't dislike) "8 1/2" by Fellini and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" by Resnais. But in her book "I Lost It At The Movies", the full reviews are a pretty harsh pan. I also wish that she had a "Best Movies" list. Nevertheless, still a very useful (but thick) book.
Rating:
Summary: AMAZING, BUT WE NEED IT ON-LINE
Review: CONCISE, INTERESTING AND DEPENDABLE. WOULD BE USEFULL ON-LINE. IS THAT A PROJECT IN THE WORKS, OR IS THEWR ANYTHING OUT THERE OF THAT NATURE?
Rating:
Summary: loads of fun
Review: Gosh... Movie reviewers can certainly offend easily. I agree with Pauline Kael's assessments roughly 50% of the time, but I still love reading her. She is always intelligent (even when she is wrong wrong wrong) --- and what a great writer! She manages to be "mean" over and over again without exactly being mean-spirited. And why on earth is a movie reviewer not supposed to have political opinions? I never understand this peculiarly American criticism. Can you review "Triumph of the Will" or "Rambo" or "La Chinoise" without venturing into the realm of politics? Probably, but why would you want to? I don't think the type of person who makes this criticism is really looking for a dry, studied dissection of film technique, but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway, she's no more "political" than any other worthwhile reviewer I can think of. This book is full of buried treasures --- quite a few films in it that I had never even heard of before. It's just a darned entertaining read, too. Every few pages, there is a laugh-out-loud funny turn of phrase. Usually a pretty mean turn of phrase but it's hard to have harsh feelings towards someone who writes, for example, in her review of "Funny Lady", "The moviemakers weren't just going to make a sequel to 'Funny Girl'---they were going to kill us." Or, in a review of "The Last Tycoon", "...so enervated, it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left."
Rating:
Summary: loads of fun
Review: Gosh... Movie reviewers can certainly offend easily. I agree with Pauline Kael's assessments roughly 50% of the time, but I still love reading her. She is always intelligent (even when she is wrong wrong wrong) --- and what a great writer! She manages to be "mean" over and over again without exactly being mean-spirited. And why on earth is a movie reviewer not supposed to have political opinions? I never understand this peculiarly American criticism. Can you review "Triumph of the Will" or "Rambo" or "La Chinoise" without venturing into the realm of politics? Probably, but why would you want to? I don't think the type of person who makes this criticism is really looking for a dry, studied dissection of film technique, but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway, she's no more "political" than any other worthwhile reviewer I can think of. This book is full of buried treasures --- quite a few films in it that I had never even heard of before. It's just a darned entertaining read, too. Every few pages, there is a laugh-out-loud funny turn of phrase. Usually a pretty mean turn of phrase but it's hard to have harsh feelings towards someone who writes, for example, in her review of "Funny Lady", "The moviemakers weren't just going to make a sequel to 'Funny Girl'---they were going to kill us." Or, in a review of "The Last Tycoon", "...so enervated, it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left."
Rating:
Summary: First rate critic, first rate collection. Deal with it.
Review: Having read Kael's work for years, I find untenable the assertion that she was favored European "art" film over American cinema. Any perusal of her writings will indicate that she lauded innovative American filmmaking - Scorsese ("Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver"), Coppola ("Godfather I" and "Godfather II"), Altman ("MASH", "McCabe", "Nashville", etc.) and was a discerning and forthright critic of "art" cinema - she does not exactly heap praise on Kubrick, she's rather reserved about Bergman (with some notable exceptions), doesn't have much use for Truffaut between "Jules et Jim" and "Adele H.", adored Antonioni's "L'Avenntura" but didn't like his other work (especially "Blow-Up"), disliked Fellini's carny-collages, and railied against the pretentious art-house cinema mind games of Resnais's "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbrad." While she does indeed praise many foreign films - and this alone seems enough to make her a snob in some people's eyes - one comes away from her works of directors she liked (Scorsese's 1980s films, Altman's 1980's films, Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder", Bunuel's "The Milky Way") and praised the works of directors she didn't (Alan Parker's "Shoot the Moon"). Granted, she was often critical of popular favorities (and some of my favorities, too - like "Goodfellas", "Wings of Desire", "Raiders of the Lost Ark") but a critic who kowtows to popular sentiment rather than exercises her own judgement isn't a critic but a publicist. It's ironic that Kael spent most of her life criticizing those "snobs" (like Dwight MacDonald) who refused to acknowledge film as a popular art form - that there could be something aesthetic in a mass art form - and now, people accuse her of the same sort of arrogance. In truth, she was one of the most lucid and analytical film critics of her time. When she dug into a film's themes, a director's motives, an actor's performance, or a cinematographer's color scheme, she could make any subject complusively readable. And she performed the critics' most important function (which is not panning, despite what people may think) -- she helped one see elements and ideas in films that were frequently overlooked or taken for granted and she helped you to see them in new ways. You may have disagreed with her but you walked away from reading her work a sharper film viewer than before. The only flaw with a collection like "5000 Nights" is that all you get are summaries, not the complete reviews, so you can't get a full appreciation of her essayistic skills. For that reason, this book should be complemented with "For Keeps" to round out not only the breadth but depth of her writings
Rating: 
Summary: Kael's Overt Agenda
Review: I agree with some of the other reviewers of the book in that Pauline Kael is always worth reading even when you will not agree with her opinions. It is great to have someone's real opinions rather than some tepid mirror of an imagined contemporary consensus. On the other hand Kael goes well beyond expressing an opinion. It is clear that she has a personal agenda that influences all her writings. This is reflected in her powerful advocacy of the New Hollywood directors of the late 60s to 70s which, no surprise, happens to coincide with her own coming of age (at least as a professional critic). I think it is transparent in her writing but is also overtly made clear by Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Indeed she played a significant role in bringing these directors to prominence and if only half the stories related by Biskind are true, she was hardly an impartial or disinterested voice. She was an insider and on her own particular power trip. Thus, in her support of these fantastically self-indulgent group of directors she must also take some responsibility for the big-studio backlash which we still suffer from today, namely big-budget, risk-averse blockbusters dependent for success more on their advertising budgets than true merit. Finally, in common with several of the other reviewers I also would like access to the original full reviews rather than these encapsulated versions. Of course a print version would be far too big. I only have the original edition but am reluctant to put out another twenty-plus dollars just for the 90s update. But I would readily buy a CD/DVD-ROM version especially if it was (i) properly formatted for searching etc and (ii) had the full original reviews.
Rating:
Summary: Kael's Overt Agenda
Review: I agree with some of the other reviewers of the book in that Pauline Kael is always worth reading even when you will not agree with her opinions. It is great to have someone's real opinions rather than some tepid mirror of an imagined contemporary consensus. On the other hand Kael goes well beyond expressing an opinion. It is clear that she has a personal agenda that influences all her writings. This is reflected in her powerful advocacy of the New Hollywood directors of the late 60s to 70s which, no surprise, happens to coincide with her own coming of age (at least as a professional critic). I think it is transparent in her writing but is also overtly made clear by Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Indeed she played a significant role in bringing these directors to prominence and if only half the stories related by Biskind are true, she was hardly an impartial or disinterested voice. She was an insider and on her own particular power trip. Thus, in her support of these fantastically self-indulgent group of directors she must also take some responsibility for the big-studio backlash which we still suffer from today, namely big-budget, risk-averse blockbusters dependent for success more on their advertising budgets than true merit. Finally, in common with several of the other reviewers I also would like access to the original full reviews rather than these encapsulated versions. Of course a print version would be far too big. I only have the original edition but am reluctant to put out another twenty-plus dollars just for the 90s update. But I would readily buy a CD/DVD-ROM version especially if it was (i) properly formatted for searching etc and (ii) had the full original reviews.
Rating:
Summary: The best!
Review: I fell in love with Pauline Kael's reviews when she wrote that Yoda looked like a wonton.
Rating: 
Summary: Mean Spirited!
Review: I have but four words for anyone thinking of getting this horrible book: Get Roger Ebert's book instead
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