It’s been seven years since the infamous film critic Pauline Kael passed away, at the rip old age of 82. Not bad for someone who used to hang out with Paul Schrader during his Taxi Driver years.

We thought what better time to remember some of the most vicious words she ever put to some of our favourite movies.

The Sound of Music

“This is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre. Whom could this operetta offend?

“Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.

“We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.”

Star Wars

“The film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset.

“The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension--a sense of wonder, perhaps.”

It’s a Wonderful Life

“In its own slurpy, bittersweet way, the picture is well done. But it's fairly humorless, and, what with all the hero's virtuous suffering, it didn't catch on with the public.

“Capra takes a serious tone here though there's no basis for the seriousness; this is doggerel trying to pass as art. It's not just that it didn't match the post-Second World War mood-it might have seemed patronizing even in the post-First World War period.”

A Clockwork Orange

“Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way-Alex's victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers.

“And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell-screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death.

“Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism.”

Fatal Attraction

“Once this woman begins behaving as if she had a right to a share in the lawyer's life, she becomes the dreaded lunatic of horror movies. But with a difference: she parrots the aggressively angry, self-righteous statements that have become commonplaces of feminist fiction, and they're so inappropriate to the circumstances that they're proof she's loco.

“They're also the director Adrian Lyne's and the screenwriter James Dearden's hostile version of feminism. The film is about men seeing feminists as witches, and the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch. Brandishing a kitchen knife, she terrorizes the lawyer and his family.

The Exorcist

“The demonic possession of a child, treated with shallow seriousness. The picture is designed to scare people, and it does so by mechanical means: levitations, swivelling heads, vomit being spewed in people's faces.

“A viewer can become glumly anesthetized by the brackish color and the senseless ugliness of the conception. Neither the producer-writer, William Peter Blatty, nor the director, William Friedkin, shows any feeling for the little girl's helplessness and suffering, or for her mother's.”

Casablanca

“Ingrid Bergman became a popular favorite when Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the most famous saloonkeeper in screen history, treated her like a whore.”

Have a different selection? We suggest you check out the Pauline Kael review database and let us know below.