5001 Nights at the Movies : Expanded For The '90s With 800 New Reviews

Rating:
Summary: Buy it if you aren't too opinionated...
Review: Pauline Kael is fascinating to read, providing you know that you won't necessarily agree with her. In fact, you'll probably become quite irritated with her blindness to the greatness of a film. But Kael is (was) a fantastic reviewer of film, because she never compromises her opinion, she makes you think, and most of all, she obviously loves movies. I say that she makes you think because when she trashes a movie that you may love, ("Star Wars," "2001: A Space Odyssey") you will start coming up with arguments to her points yourself. Thus, she does what any great critic should do: challenge your opinion of a film, and make you gain a new perspective of what made that film great or terrible. Furthermore, Kael was one of the first major critics to do this. I also said that Kael obviously loved movies. This really comes across when she gives a film a good review. Her praise is, to say the least, glowing. If she thinks that a film is brilliant, she seems almost giddy in her writing. In short, Pauline Kael possesses all the qualities of a great reviewer.

Rating:
Summary: Buy it if you aren't too opinionated...
Review: Pauline Kael is fascinating to read, providing you know that you won't necessarily agree with her. In fact, you'll probably become quite irritated with her blindness to the greatness of a film. But Kael is (was) a fantastic reviewer of film, because she never compromises her opinion, she makes you think, and most of all, she obviously loves movies. I say that she makes you think because when she trashes a movie that you may love, ("Star Wars," "2001: A Space Odyssey") you will start coming up with arguments to her points yourself. Thus, she does what any great critic should do: challenge your opinion of a film, and make you gain a new perspective of what made that film great or terrible. Furthermore, Kael was one of the first major critics to do this. I also said that Kael obviously loved movies. This really comes across when she gives a film a good review. Her praise is, to say the least, glowing. If she thinks that a film is brilliant, she seems almost giddy in her writing. In short, Pauline Kael possesses all the qualities of a great reviewer.

Rating:
Summary: The best collection of criticism you'll ever read.
Review: Pauline Kael is the single greatest critic of the twentieth century, in any medium. Fiercely partisan and often deeply spiteful, she has an energy to her writing that is incomparable. Her knowledge of film is, of course, excellent, despite the gentleman below who revealed his own ignorance by dismissing DePalma as a second rate talent. Simply because some people disagree with her, they slag her off as bitter and twisted. But, there are few more generous critics among her peers - consider, for example, her right-on-the-money review of "Mean Streets". When she is bitchy, she is hilariously funny - her dissection of "Top Gun" and "Dances With Wolves" should be savoured by anyone who loves invective.

Rating:
Summary: Take It With a Grain of Salt!
Review: Pauline Kael, while often entertaining and erudite, is one film critic who needs to be read very, very carefully. Her prejudices and oversights are legion. Whole genres and careers are disposed of with little thought or discussion. American film (including most popular Hollywood products) is dismissed out of hand. She thoughtlessly skewers particular film actors whose work and careers have long since been re-evaluated and revitalized by other, more discerning critics (Norma Shearer is a good example). Kael harps on endlessly about the value of obscure European films that are often grainy, grim, technically inept, and a trial to watch. Her whole, 1960's philosophy of "American film sucks, European film is flawless" is outdated and tiresome. She can be witty, but her jokes are often at the expense of true, thoughtful insight and analysis of the films she is critiqueing. If a reader followed her advice whole, he or she would miss out on many of the great moments and performances in film history. Kael has her moments, and, if nothing else, her reviews, pro and con, may lead the reader to seek out and view the films themselves, as well as reading the work of other, more balanced critics of film.

Rating:
Summary: The sine qua non of movie reference guides
Review: Since this book firstc ame out in the mid 1980s I have gone through no less than four well thumbed, well handled editions that have fallen apart from overuse. This is a compendium of all Pauline Kael's shorter reviews from the front of THE NEW YORKER, and it has perhaps given me more pleasure than any other book in my life. By no means exhaustive (Kael even made a gesture towards its ultimate incompleteness by neglecting to comment directly on GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ), the book covers more films than you would imagine, and its always fun to see what Kael saw and what she thought about it. Her aesthetic--simultaneously magisterial and informal, Olympian and fun-loving--has been discussed, critiqued, and even criticized to death; yet there is no getting around the fact that she is not only smarter than most other movie critics but also funnier. Her reviews of works as disparate as "The White Cliffs of Dover," "The Sound of Music," and the 1951 "Show Boat," have given me joy for years. Buy this, and see if you don;t have to buy yourself another copy when the first one wears out.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful for any film book collection.
Review: This is a very good anthology of Pauline Kael's writings, but capsule reviews are very unsatisfying to those who are familiar with the strengths of her reviews as they were originally written. Kael is known for her flowing, "conversational" writing style; by chopping many of her reviews into two or three paragraphs, the main reasons for reading her in the first place tend to evaporate. In a typical Kael review, she literally layered opinions on top of opinions. It was not enough for her to simply review a movie--she had to express exactly how the directors and actors had grown (or diminished themselves). One looked forward to reading her because she had such a superb way of relating the film she was writing about to other films, whether by the same director or not, and she could intelligently speculate on how the film tied in to current events or may have been a product of them. She would talk expertly about how many films seemed to evolve out of other less superior ones and then expand due to a director's vision and desire to update a particular theme. Kael focused on what a movie is about--what it is really saying--and her dedication and playfulness was quite infectious (the many reviewers who used her style became known as Paulettes.) For a reference book, "5001 Nights At The Movies" is fun to look through; it is full of reviews but it is Kael-lite. She didn't call one of her best books "Deeper Into Movies" for nothing!

Rating:
Summary: More in a few words than other critics get into books
Review: What is it about Pauline Kael's reviews that catch us off guard? Maybe it's because she's so much better at evoking a movie--saying what's actually there--that even when we disagree we're forced to reckon with her analysis. Whether or not we share her opinions, she teaches us how to respond to movies with our brains and guts and hearts at once.