Pauline Kael wasn't someone who, living in a golden age, complained about how yellow everything was. "This has been a legendary period in movies," she declares in the last New Yorker column collected here (a review of The Sorrow and the Pity). It certainly had been, and her vivid responses to classic pictures like The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, MASH and Cabaret will increase your enjoyment of them. Alas, not long after this book appeared the heavy hand of The Force crushed American film like an empty can of Budweiser.

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