The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: A Library of America Speci [Paperback]

"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," Pauline Kael once observed, "just because you must use everything you are and everything you know." Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer forThe New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor's gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To readThe Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an era-among themBreathless,Bonnie and Clyde,The Leopard,The Godfather,Last Tango in Paris,Nashville-along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page."Pauline Kael was not only one of our greatest film critics, but one of our best nonfiction prose writers. Her range is on brilliant display in this thrilling collection, reminding us what all the excitement was and still is about." —Phillip LopatePauline Kael reached national attention in the 1960s, first in a brief stint as critic forThe New Rl“Ô