Pauline Kael

The former New Yorker writer reviewed movies for the magazine for 25 years, and is the author of 13 books about the cinema, including a National Book Award winner. Her newest book is a collection of more than 275 of her reviews, called "For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies."

Film critic Pauline Kael talk to us from her house in Massachusetts. Kael spent years reviewing movies for The New Yorker. Her final collection of New Yorker reviews has just been published. It's called "Movie Love: Complete Reviews 1988-1991. (It's published by William Abrahams).

Every three years or so, a collection of Pauline Kael's movie reviews are collected into a book. Her forthcoming anthology is called Hooked. Kael believes film once served as a kind of common culture, and bemoans the fragmentation of movie audiences. She joins Fresh Air to talk about the state of the film industry and the changing tastes and expectations of audiences.

From a white-knuckle Wall Street chronicle to a modernized Shakespearean war story, the films on David Edelstein's best-of-the-year list tell solid stories new and old.

The Vanity Fair critic was an aspiring writer when he arrived in a turbulen Manhattan in 1972. In his memoir, Lucking Out, he writes about the crime and culture (and pornography) he discovered there.

Film critic Pauline Kael died yesterday at the age of 82. We will talk with her former editor William Whitworth. He was her editor at the New Yorker from 1975 to 1980. He also former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and currently Editor Emeritus of the Atlantic.