Product Description

Smart, funny, and unforgettable, Pauline Kael is the most interesting and influential film critic in America. Her ability to skewer an actor or director and her wit, insight, and thorough knowledge of the film business make her by far the most rewarding regular observer of the movie scene.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102222 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

Amazon.com Review
This series of capsule movie reviews by the great Pauline Kael is actually an anthology of her writings for the "Goings on About Town" section of the New Yorker magazine. In 5001 Nights, Kael digs into the heart of each movie she considers with extraordinary penetration and exuberance. And while every movie you know may not appear here, each of Kael's reviews is detailed enough to provide tremendous insight into the movies that are covered. This book is as much fun to browse as it is to read through. Whether you've run the rounds at your local video store, Kael will lead you to treasures you may not know are out there.

Customer Reviews

The sine qua non of movie reference guides
Since this book first came 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.

Helpful for any film book collection.
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!

Excellent overview
As someone who is just beginning to explore the classics, I love being able to see what Pauline Kael thought about many of the most important movies of our time. Since I often agree with her, it helps me save time and money in determining which movies I want to rent (and if not available to rent, buy). All movie titles are in alphabetical order, and there is an index in the back which contains film titles, directors, actors, etc.

However, the capsule reviews can occasionally be misleading. From the capsules, I thought Pauline liked (or at least didn't dislike) "8 1/2" by Fellini and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" by Resnais. But in her book "I Lost It At The Movies", the full reviews are a pretty harsh pan.

I also wish that she had a "Best Movies" list. Nevertheless, still a very useful (but thick) book.