Pauline Kael for keeps

If you truly love movies, read lots of criticism. Pauline Kael is the Queen.

Louis Menand wrote in The New York Review of Books in March 1995: ''Kael was the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time, and she made it possible to care about movies without feeling pompous or giddy by showing that what comes first in everyone's experience of a movie isn't the form or the idea but the sensation, and that this is just as true for moviegoers who have been taught to intellectualize their responses to art as it is for everyone else.''