“... Lorre is distressingly human – ‘a small fat man, sweating in his uncomfortable clothes’, as Pauline Kael wrote. You can almost smell the goulash on his breath, and taste his all too ordinary greed as he sits at a café and gulps down two cognacs, after a mother’s timely arrival has thwarted his intention to kidnap yet another girl outside a ...”

“... to think.’ Anyone familiar with the films of Henry Fonda will recognise this way of thinking. Pauline Kael called it ‘liberal masochism’ – the fantasy of perfectly reasonable liberals, besieged on all sides by perfectly bigoted conservatives. Its purest form is the redemption narrative in which the pure-hearted liberal converts the bigots by ...”

“... Sirk melodrama than anything by Cocteau. If Lynch was ‘the first popular surrealist’, as Pauline Kael described him in 1986, the ‘pop’ part was just as important as the surreal.Lynch inherited from Sirk the basic tenets of melodrama: that the objects, people and gestures that seem most simple, even clichéd, are those most burdened by ...”

“... giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk ...”

“... was a Gesamtkunstwerk of the Holocaust, as darkly transcendent as the event itself. When Pauline Kael panned the film – ‘Shoah is a long moan. It’s saying: “We’ve always been oppressed, and we’ll be oppressed again”’ – the New Yorker received a flurry of outraged letters. But in the 27 years since its release, the film’s ...”

“... cachet – thanks above all to his friend Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura – that Pauline Kael grumbled about a ‘creeping Marienbadism’. When ‘The Talk of the Town’ told him ‘we didn’t feel we had completely understood’ the plot of Last Year at Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet replied: ‘Moi non plus.’ He was well spoken, well ...”

“... from an indebted and resentful following? This posture of the disappointed enthusiast led Pauline Kael to describe Citizen Kane as ‘a shallow masterpiece’, and to forgive the man who made it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ...”

“... surgery – and wonder how he survived with his creative faculties intact.’ He did survive. As Pauline Kael once said of Jean Cocteau, these wiry guys are tougher than they look. At any point after, oh, The Plot against America (2004), a waking, walking nightmare of democracy undone that gained renewed relevance after the election of Trump, Roth might ...”

“... it is not her own. In the New York Review of Books of 14 August 1980, Renata Adler described Pauline Kael’s latest collection of essays as ‘piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless’ – what Lucca says of Smith’s book. Lacey alerts us to her borrowings in an author’s note directing the reader to the end of the ...”