Pauline Kael Quotes

I believe there's only good cinema and bad cinema.

Oh, it takes a lot for me to walk out of a film.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

I don't know if it's fair to say that it's a bad time for movies. It seems to me that throughout the entire history of filmmaking, every year there have been about two really wonderful movies, about 10 others that are pretty good, and a whole pile of garbage.

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.

Why do my movies make people feel so dead inside?

Somebody once said, you have to wait 20 years before you can tell if a movie's any good or not so that's probably true.

I'm not a Hollywood basher because enough good movies come out of the Hollywood system every year to justify its existence, without any apologies.

Fair or not, it always sucks when everyone wanders back from Sundance talking about how bad the movies were.

I think that there's good movies and there's bad movies, and sometimes the bad movies spoil it for the rest of us, and we focus on them, but in the long run, all that matters are the good movies. Those are the ones that we will remember.

I firmly believe that emotions are universal, and I know that when they connect with the audience, it works. There is no such thing as an entertaining or a serious film; there are good films and bad films. Good films will always find a vast audience.

My motto: 'No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.'

I think whether you're a movie critic and have seen a million movies, or you're just a normal popcorn movie watcher, you can tell the difference when someone is just laying it on too thick.

As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or not watch the film.

A strange thing happens when Spielberg discusses his own work. His degree of self-criticism seems a direct reflection of each film's box-office performance. You will not catch him complaining that the audience 'didn't get' a film; if it didn't do well, it generally didn't deserve to.

I don't think cinema is big or small. It's just good or bad.

There is no good or bad cinema, there are films that connect either less or more with audience.

I think there are just bad films and good films. Period.

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse

There are only two types of cinema - good or bad.

In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

Any film that you see is never just the director. If it's a film that you love, it's not so easy to say, "Oh it's directed by this person - that means everything that person directs is going be wonderful."

It's tough to make a good movie. I think the bigger the movies are, the worse they are. A lot of big movies make a lot of money and you kind of forget about what they are and they don't really make you think.

You know what's funny about movies? You can watch one, and then you watch it again at a different stage in your life, and you understand different messages from the same film.