Pauline Kael: The Films She Championed
The New Yorker's most influential — and most combative — film critic never made a ranked list; she distrusted them on principle. So this page is the next best thing: films Kael famously went to bat for in print, ranked by our composite canon score rather than anyone's memory of her enthusiasm.
Kael left no list, so this selection is our reconstruction from her published raves (provenance in the essay below) — and the ranking is our composite score, not a claim about her order of preference.
- 1The Godfather1972 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States / Italy · crime, drama, thriller9.75
Empire 500 (2008) #1 · Oscar Best Picture winner 1972 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #3
- 2Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles · United States · drama, biography, mystery9.21
AFI 100 (2007) #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #2 · AFI 100 (1998) #1
- 3The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · drama, crime, thriller5.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 4E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial1982 · Steven Spielberg · United States · sci-fi, drama4.17
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1982 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1982 · AFI 100 (2007) #24
- 5Bonnie and Clyde1967 · Arthur Penn · United States · drama, crime, biography3.82
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1968 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1967 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1967
- 6Nashville1975 · Robert Altman · United States · comedy, drama, musical3.41
Ebert's annual top 10 1975 #1 · Siskel's annual top 10 1975 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975
- 7Z1969 · Costa-Gavras · France · drama, thriller2.72
Ebert's annual top 10 1969 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1970 #3 · Siskel's annual top 10 1969 #1
- 8Bande à part1964 · Jean-Luc Godard · France · crime, romance, drama2.05
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1964 #1 · TIME All-TIME 100 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
- 9Jules and Jim1962 · François Truffaut · France · romance, drama2.01
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1962 #2 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1964 #2 · Empire 500 (2008) #338
- 10Weekend1967 · Jean-Luc Godard · France / Italy · comedy, drama1.96
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1967 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1969 #4 · Ebert's annual top 10 1969 #3
- 11McCabe & Mrs. Miller1971 · Robert Altman · United States · western, drama1.71
Ebert's annual top 10 1971 #2 · Siskel's annual top 10 1971 #3 · National Film Registry (inducted 2010)
- 12Last Tango in Paris1972 · Bernardo Bertolucci · France / Italy · drama, romance1.33
Ebert's annual top 10 1973 #2 · Siskel's annual top 10 1973 #2 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1973 #10
- 13Mean Streets1973 · Martin Scorsese · United States · drama, crime, thriller1.33
National Film Registry (inducted 1997) · Siskel's annual top 10 1974 #5 · Empire 500 (2008) #377
- 14The Earrings of Madame de...1953 · Max Ophüls · France / Italy · drama, romance1.15
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #90 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Criterion Collection spine #445
- 15Shoeshine1946 · Vittorio De Sica · Italy · crime, drama0.77
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1950 #7 · NYT Best 1,000 Movies · Criterion Collection spine #1272
- 16
- 17Blow Out1981 · Brian De Palma · United States · crime, mystery, thriller0.48
Empire 500 (2008) #139 · Criterion Collection spine #562 · Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite movies
The critic who refused to make lists
Pauline Kael reviewed movies for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, and for those two decades she was the most influential film critic in the English language — imitated by a generation of writers (the "Paulettes"), feared by studios, and read by people who had no intention of seeing the movie. She wrote in a slangy, first-person, physically excited prose that treated moviegoing as an appetite rather than a discipline; her collected reviews carry titles like I Lost It at the Movies and When the Lights Go Down, and her 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies" remains the best defense ever written of loving movies for the wrong reasons.
She is also a methodological problem for a site like this one, and we'd rather be honest about it: Kael never made a ranked list, famously claimed to watch each film only once, and distrusted canons on principle. There is no "Kael Top 100" to ingest. What she left instead were verdicts — decisive, career-making raves delivered at full volume. Her review of Bonnie and Clyde (a 7,000-word defense the New Republic refused to print) helped rescue the film and put New Hollywood in motion; her advance rave for Nashville ran before the film was even finished; Last Tango in Paris got compared, in the magazine's own pages, to the premiere of The Rite of Spring. She championed early Scorsese, Altman and De Palma when each was still a risk.
So the list above is our reconstruction, not her ranking: films whose championing by Kael is a matter of published record, drawn from her collected reviews, and then ordered — like everything on this site — by our composite canon score. Where her enthusiasms and the consensus canon disagree, that gap is the most Kael thing on the page.