"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," Pauline Kael once observed, "just because you must use everything you are and everything you know." Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor's gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a...

The complete story of one of the world's most famous and controversial films: "A definitive chronicle of the making of the film"—Sheridan Morley, Films & Filming. This is the complete companion to Citizen Kane—the film that was "designed to shock" (Kenneth Tynan)—one of the best-loved and best-known movies in the history of Hollywood and still the most staggering film debut ever. Not only was this Orson Welles's first film as actor and director but most of the cast were also new to the cinema. Yet so controversial was the subject matter that an $842,000 bribe and the concentrated wrath of the Hearst newspaper empire combined in an attempt to strangle its distribution. And the authorship of the film is still a subject of conflict. Pauline Kael's long essay, "Raising Kane," dissects a maze of Hollywood lore to re-evaluate these and many other fascinating stories about the making of this remarkable film. "Citizen Kane revolutionised film-making, and the question of its authorship is as important to the cinema as that of Hamlet to the theatre ... Pauline Kael explains how the picture came to be made and concludes that the man most responsible for its creation was not Welles but Herman J. Mankiewicz."—Kenneth Tynan, ObserverTHE BEST FILM CRITIC IN THE U.S. ON THE BEST SOUND FILM EVER MADE IN THE U.S. THE INCREDIBLE INSIDE STORY ON THE MAKING OF A MONUMENTAL MOTION PICTURE!Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher. A great deal in the movie that was conventional and almost banal in 1941 is so far in the past as to have been forgotten and become new. The Pop characterizations look modern, and rather better than they did at the time . . .