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Pauline Kael
Brash, jazzy and passionately idiosyncratic, Pauline Kael set the standard for American movie criticism. Kael was hired at the New Yorker by editor William Shawn in 1967. There, Kael came into her own. Her credo: “The reader is in on my thought processes.” No other movie critic would agree with her famous claim that the 1972 premiere of Last Tango in Paris is a “date that should become a landmark in movie history.”
While covering movies, she also managed to work in her knowledge and passion for everything from Henry James to ballet to TV sitcoms, and without any self-consciousness or warning would drop in bits of autobiography or various insights regarding her own hard-earned wisdom about the battle between the sexes.
—By Ben Tucker, Courtesy of Salon.com
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