Directors, playwrights, and colleagues offer their viewpoints on influential film critic Pauline Kael in Rob Garver's fair-minded documentary. For the most part, they praise her distinct perspective and her refusal to cater to the whims of studios and advertisers. As journalist Lili Anolik puts it, she turned criticism into an "expressive art form." The film's voice-over draws from Kael's interviews combined with Sarah Jessica Parker's readings from her work. To this material, Garver adds film and TV clips that reflect the films she reviewed as much as the life she lived. Kael started out as a young woman who valued books more than movies and read all she could from her favorite authors. In her early days, she worked as a nanny, wrote advertising copy, and had a short-lived relationship with poet James Broughton, which produced a daughter, Gina James, who appears in the film (since Kael never learned to type, Gina served as her stenographer). For some time, she programmed a series of theaters in Berkeley, though Garver doesn't explain how she made the move to theatrical exhibition. Kael's first review, a pan of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, sprung from a social outing. On The Dick Cavett Show, she explains that she prefers Chaplin in cynical mode to Chaplin in maudlin mode. That attitude would characterize the unsentimental criticism to come. Cultural critic Greil Marcus, who frequented her Telegraph Avenue theaters, notes that she often critiqued other critics as much as the films they reviewed. She didn't aim to play the contrarian so much as to integrate—and then demolish—the competition as part of her pieces. In retrospect, it seems a little mean-spirited, something critic Molly Haskell mentions in regards to Kael's objections to her late husband Andrew Sarris's influential auteur theory (the idea that significant directors have certain recognizable traits). From program notes, Kael graduated to a collection of film criticism, I Lost It at the Movies, which led to more books, in addition to lectures, TV appearances, and columns in national magazines, most notably The New Yorker. Her raves helped to make films hits and her pans did the exact opposite. She also influenced a host of younger film critics, from Vanity Fair's James Wolcott to Paul Schrader, an acolyte who would segue to screenwriting and directing. Garver ends by looking at her best known reviews, particular her enthusiasm for Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris and her discontent with Shoah and Apocalypse Now. She made enemies, like director David Lean, but nothing deterred her from speaking her mind. If Parker doesn't sound much like Kael, it's still helpful to hear her reviews read aloud, allowing viewers to reflect on a unique style that could seem poetic one moment and petty the next. In contrast to her assessment of Gregory Peck, who she once described as "competent but always a little boring," Kael was many things, but boring was never one of them. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P.