Pauline Kael: The Films She Championed

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.