Pauline Kael

Wednesday July 1, 1998      Wistful and willful, delighted and heartbroken, there has never been a face quite like Giulietta Masina's. To see her in the beautifully restored 1957 "Nights of Cabiria" is to witness the indomitability of life itself, to...

Beware any movie that wears its art on its sleeve. That advice, however, is rarely heeded by Oscar voters, who are all too easily impressed by vaulting ambition and precious, highfalutin technique. It's understandable that they might be inclined to...

You could say that the "The Battle of Algiers" is back. The great political film of the modern era has returned in a new (and newly subtitled) 35-millimeter print struck from the original negative. However, what's most impressive about this 1965 epic of...

"Pepe le Moko" is the stuff that dreams are made of. An acknowledged classic of doomed romanticism and atmospheric fatalism, this 1937 French film was such a hit on its release that Hollywood promptly remade it as "Algiers" and kept the original off U.S....

Of all the performances that have made Jeanne Moreau revered among actresses, her work in "Bay of Angels" is one of the most compelling and one of the least seen. Directed in 1963 by Jacques Demy, "Bay of Angels" has been unavailable theatrically in this...

One day in April 1983, a young man of 33, already the author of one acclaimed biography and hard at work on another, apprehensively rang the bell of Katharine Hepburn's brownstone on New York's East 49th Street. He had twice tried and failed to meet her,...

When President Bush called on Americans to "finish the work of the fallen" in Iraq, he did not expect that filmmaker Michael Moore would answer. Moore has more than answered. He has responded with a vengeance in "Fahrenheit 9/11," a blistering...