Pauline Kael

  • What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) As a movie reviewer, I am legally obliged to burn a candle to patron saint Pauline Kael every year or so. I kid, but I have several of her books on my shelves, and her influence remains undeniable even decades after her death. While her approach may not seem all that novel today, it’s because she led the charge in democratizing movie reviewing, making it approachable to the masses in a way that feels right at home in today’s film criticism environment. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael presents an overview of her life, from early formative experience (she saw first-run silent movies in theatres!) to her picking up a pen as a critic in her mid-thirties and then living an immersive life in film… even if it didn’t pay the bills. Fair amounts of Kael’s own writing feature in the film, giving a fair depiction of a writer in audiovisual format. The other thing that comes across is Kael’s own unpretentiousness, as she skewers films, receives comments (freeze-frame for a really fun letter from Gene Hackman) and reflects on her own life through interview footage. Clearly meant as a celebration of Kael rather than a warts-and-all critique, What She Said is nonetheless a good introduction or refresher to a significant figure in film criticism. It makes a decent case for her importance and gives viewers a peek at the words that made her so famous. It’s difficult to ask for more!

  • For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

    For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Of course, you would find a review of For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism on a site dedicated to film reviewing and criticism. Critics talking about criticism is catnip to critics, and writer-director Gerald Peary clearly knows this: his film is pretty much all about the basics of American Film Criticism over the past hundred years, featuring archival footage, talking-head interviews and a bit of narration from Patricia Clarkson. All the major pre-2010 critics are featured here, whether it’s Ebert, Kael (in archival footage), Scott, Mitchell, Maltin, Maslin, Reed and Siskel. Amazingly enough in a passing-the-torch kind of manner, it also features Harry Knowles at the height of his popularity (now thankfully over, but I remember those times), and Karina Longworth long before she became the podcaster of the essential You Must Remember This. The production values of this documentary are on the lower end, but the content is great. Crucially, the film was shot over eight years, through the growing obsolescence of print film criticism – while this dates the film in significant ways, it also preserves this facet of American film history when it was relatively fresh. Surprisingly enough, there weren’t (aren’t?) many or any formal histories of film criticism at the time of For the Love of Movies’ release – this is both original and important as a first-draft history and as a celebration of the meaning of criticism. Far from taking cheap shots at something that nearly everyone thinks they can do (I cough-cough guiltily), this is a documentary that insists on establishing how movies would be poorer without critical commentary.