The age of movies : selected writings of Pauline Kael

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Bibliographic Information

The age of movies : selected writings of Pauline Kael

edited by Sanford Schwartz

Library of America, c2011

Available at  / 7 libraries

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Note

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

"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 for "The 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 read "The 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 them "Breathless," "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.

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Details

  • NCID
    BB07343651
  • ISBN
    • 9781598531091
  • LCCN
    2011923053
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    New York
  • Pages/Volumes
    xxiv, 828 p.
  • Size
    25 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
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