At the movies with Pauline Kael – in the arthouse cinema where she got her start

Perhaps no film critic has been as influential, or as controversial, as Pauline Kael (1919-2001). The short documentary Ed and Pauline (2014) explores Kael’s early writing life by focusing on her successful partnership with – and brief marriage to – Edward Landberg (1923-2012), with whom she ran the beloved Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio in California. Combining archival footage, re-enactments and interviews with industry insiders such as the filmmaker John Waters, the directors Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic reveal Kael’s impact on cinema lovers in California’s Bay Area, before her fame-making stint as a film critic at The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Using excerpts from Kael’s programme notes for the small independent theatre, Bruno and Vekic find fragments of the idiosyncratic opinions, anti-elitist sensibilities and witty, colloquial voice that made her writing legendary.