New York’s Quad Cinema is set to celebrate the centennial of film critic Pauline Kael. The theater will screen 25 films that she revered, as well as a few that she trashed. “In the golden age of film criticism, no reviewer was more fierce and more opinionated than Pauline Kael,” a press release from the Quad notes. “A Berkeley dropout and single mother, Kael began writing about film in the early 1950s. Happy to buck popular wisdom and go her own intensely personal way, by the mid-1960s, she was writing for top magazines and her reviews were collected in … books (‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,’ ‘Taking It All In’). When Kael joined The New Yorker in 1968, she soon became the most influential voice on an exploding art form, staking a position that often privileged ‘trash’ over ‘art.'”
Known for mentoring screenwriters and younger critics, Kael “boosted filmmakers’ reputations, questioned classics, [and] poured scornful cold water on overheated or self-serious movies.”
Slated to take place June 7-20, “Losing It At the Movies: Pauline Kael at 100” will include screenings of “Jaws,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “The Godfather,” among other films. It’s worth noting that none of the titles are directed by women.
In June 2018 #TimesUp created a database of female critics. Earlier that same month USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative released a study examining gender in U.S. film criticism. Across the 100 top movies of 2017 and 19,559 reviews, male critics authored 77.8 percent of reviews and female critics authored 22.2 percent, translating into a gender ratio of 3.5 male reviewers to every one female.
