Pauline Kael
Photo: Rollins Maxwell · Public domain · source
The New Yorker's film critic from 1968 to 1991, and the most argued-with voice American criticism has produced. Kael wrote in the first person and from the body — what the film did to you in the dark was the datum, and respectability was a smell. Her collections (I Lost It at the Movies, For Keeps) read as one long case that vitality beats polish, and a generation of critics — the 'Paulettes' — formed inside her orbit, for better and worse.