Review of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019) by Brent_Marchant — 30 Apr 2020

This cinematic homage to one of film criticism's most influential -- and controversial -- representatives provides audiences with a passable overview of its subject, but it feels unsatisfyingly incomplete, never quite getting to the meat of the matter as effectively as it could have.

We're provided with the requisite biography, interviews with knowledgeable commentators and narrated snippets of the critic's prose, but what's lacking is a meaningful, in-depth, coherently organized discussion of the motivations and sensibilities that drove her work.

Instead, we're given a scattershot buffet of passing observations, reminiscences of colleagues and those she wrote about, and anecdotes about specific films that she either liked or detested. Viewers come away from this offering never really grasping what drove Pauline Kael's work and why, leaving a more than palpable and lingering sense of hunger, a disappointment given how significant a role she played in the field in which she became such a powerful influence.