Tarantino has explained that Pauline Kael's phrases ended up becoming part of his memory. Her influence helps us understand criticism as an experience that stays with the viewer after closing the book.
A reader of films who became a reference point
Pauline Kael began publishing in The New Yorker in 1967 and became the magazine's film critic in 1968, after her defence of Bonnie and Clyde. She remained there until her retirement in 1991. Her texts were collected in books such as I Lost It at the Movies and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which made it possible to read her judgements beyond the weekly news cycle.
For Quentin Tarantino, that writing was a lasting point of reference. In the conversation with Lynn Hirschberg published on 29 January 2020 in Five Things, he explained that he had read Kael so much that her ideas and phrases would come to mind spontaneously. The memory describes an influence taken into memory, not simply distant admiration for a prestigious figure.
The difference is significant. A critic can recommend a film and disappear from the later experience. They can also provide a way of asking about it: what an actor does, where the tone shifts, or why a scene feels stimulating. In that second case, the reading changes your attention even when the viewer no longer remembers which article an observation came from.
There is no need to turn that relationship into in-person teaching. Reading one author for years allows for sustained formation without there being a course, a tutorial, or approval of each future work. Kael's documented influence on Tarantino belongs above all to reading and to the way of thinking about cinema that reading made possible.
Pleasure as a critical starting point
Kael defended a style of writing capable of recognising the pleasure of popular cinema without demanding an air of solemnity. Value could appear in a performance, a rhythm or a mixture of tones that a prior classification had relegated to minor entertainment. That disposition helps explain why her name is so relevant when speaking of a filmmaker who gives attention to films of very different genres and reputations.
A concrete example appears in the relationship with Bande a part, by Jean-Luc Godard. The evocation published by Air Mail in November 2022 recalls the impact on Tarantino of the way Kael described the poetic transformation of a popular crime story. The interest lay in what a film could find within materials considered vulgar, rather than in abandoning those materials in order to become respectable.
The lesson can be phrased as a reading question: what does this scene produce that its summary plot cannot explain? Saying that two characters talk or that someone runs away barely describes the event. The actor's voice, an interruption, the length of a pause or another character's reaction can turn it into something quite different. Criticism becomes useful when it makes that difference perceptible.
In 2022, David Bordwell linked Tarantino's criticism with Kael's because of its attention to performance, dialogue, genre and audience response. That affinity does not mean that the two judge all films in the same way. It points to a shared territory: the viewer's experience matters, and enthusiasm for a scene can begin the argument rather than appear only as a final verdict.
Describing that style as anti-academic requires care. The liveliness of a voice does not remove the need to observe precisely; a colloquial phrase can contain a complex distinction. Likewise, a provocative tone does not by itself guarantee that an opinion is insightful. What is interesting about the relationship is not replacing analysis with spontaneity, but keeping the person doing the looking visible.
Influence, disagreement and personal writing
The relationship is especially clear in Cinema Speculation, where Tarantino mixes memory, commentary on films and speculation. The reader hears a voice that does not try to hide its preferences. That choice makes it possible to discuss them directly: we know what delights the author, what irritates him and from which experience he organises part of his questions.
The risk of such personal writing is that verbal confidence can seem a sufficient demonstration. A brilliant judgement may point to something real or impose an impression that is too quick. Reading Kael and then Tarantino is more productive if the possibility of disagreement is kept open. Admiration does not oblige us to adopt every rejection or to defend a film out of loyalty to the critic.
The distance between criticising and making also matters. A filmmaker can learn from a review without transferring it literally into a scene. Words guide questions; films need to resolve them with images, sound and performances. There is no automatic equivalence between an admired phrase and a concrete directorial decision, and attributing one requires more than recognising a similar tone.
To begin exploring that influence, it is worth reading one of Kael's reviews of a well-known film and comparing her observations with your own experience. After that, it can be compared with a Tarantino chapter on another similar title. The relationship then appears in concrete operations: how they describe a performance, how they justify a pleasure and how much space they give to the disagreement a film provokes.
Back to Tarantino's books, criticism and film-related projects.