I’ve long had a soft spot for books about
the movies. My space-challenged loft features a shelving unit,
embarrassingly overstuffed from floor to ceiling, dedicated to the topic
— from collections of critical essays and reviews to interviews with or
biographies on filmmakers to wide-ranging histories of an art form
that’s still in its relative infancy.
by Jason Gargano
11.03.2011
The Return of Pauline Kael
A pair of new books centering on film critic Pauline Kael — The Library of America's lavishly rendered The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael and Brian Kellow's incisive biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark — have resulted in an avalanche of recent Kael appraisals and reminiscences a decade after her death in 2001 and 20 years after her retirement from writing in 1991. I can't quite remember when I became aware of Kael, but it had to be in my late teens, which is when I began to move beyond the Hollywood blockbusters of my youth and into deeper, more adventurous cinematic waters. I do know that my initial Kael exposure occurred after she had retired from The New Yorker, where she rather famously wrote film essays and reviews for nearly 25 years.
