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Let's read the opening of Pauline Kael's defining review of Bonnie & Clyde

How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were oursnot an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other moviesgo too far for some tastesand Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The Manchurian Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard. Though we may dismiss the attacks with What good movie doesnt give some offense?, the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with itperhaps a law should be passed against it. Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or knowing, group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.

So what's going on here? When Bonnie & Clyde first released, many of the long-seated print critics blasted it, most notoriously Crowther of the NYT. Once he had been an advocate for disruptive films, but he had a reductive and outdated understanding of depictions of violence, unable to see Bonnie & Clyde as anything than more than perverse entertainment. For Kael, "understanding" why and how violence is portrayed and employed in the film preceded and informed her "judgment" of the movie. But for Crowther, judgment preceded and informed understanding-- a violent movie is bad, therefore the movie used violence in bad ways.

Pauline Kael, part of the generation who would develop and consume the 70s "New Hollywood" films, understood Bonnie & Clyde because it spoke a language her generation understood. Having grown up in the social, political, and military violence of the 60s, the young generation had a different relationship with depictions of violence than their elders who grew up under the Hays Code era of film censorship. Bonnie & Clyde did not depict thrills and fun, it depicted a terrible brutality that gave the film weight and realness.

Kael was responding to the movie as a work of art. That's the difference between her and the interviewed "MovieTok"-ers. The latter seemingly reject interest in movies mattering, instead insisting they be reduced to entertainment products. The need to react to or wrestle thoughtfully with the contents of a film is bypassed. Judgment precedes understanding.