Glancing over the volumes on film that line my shelves, Pauline Kael's For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies always seems to beckon to me. Kael may not be the most levelheaded critic out there, but her most recent, gargantuan collection--nearly 1500 pages of her opinions and nothing but--speaks to me like no other book of its kind. Her writing is funny, her opinions grandiose, and more than once she's prompted me to revisit and rediscover a great film. Kael has yet to convince this writer that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a failure, but, hell, she had the audacity to slam Network, and that's enough to endear her to me.

For Keeps is an imposing collection of hundreds of the reviews she wrote for various publications between 1961 and 1990. Published only three years ago, it's a must-purchase, recapturing, in particular, the dynamism of 1970's filmmaking through a series of masterly critiques, each of which instantly evokes the film in question. To be honest, I haven't read each essay in its entirety (one could watch Nashville in about the same amount of time it takes to read Kael's long, ogling take on it), but simply skimming the reviews is a joy. I'm not sure how many times I've turned back to Kael's famous rave of The Godfather Part II--probably about twice as many as I've seen the film--for sheer entertainment, to jolt my memory, and to remind myself of how I would like my writing to read. In fact, as much as I love that film, I've always felt that it's slightly more weighty than it should have been. Somehow, it's not as personal, in a way, as its predecessor, and Kael helped me to understand my feelings on it better when she wrote: "There may be too many scenes of plotting heads, and at times one wishes the sequences to be more fully developed." Indeed, Francis Coppola, to my mind, is not nearly as economical a filmmaker here as he was in the first film--and, as stated, I have Kael to thank for this realization.

Kael lovingly recounts her days at "The New Yorker" in For Keeps' prologue, then moves on to remind us how the industry got to the point it's at now. Her mid-'70's reviews are the highlights; as she herself tells us, in the "60's she was working to achieve her own voice, and by the "80's she was past her prime. In her golden age, it was easy to read any two of her reviews from the same year--McCabe & Mrs. Miller and A Clockwork Orange, for example--and realize that she knew exactly what she liked. (She doesn't hesitate to call the former "A pipe dream of a movie"; she dismisses the latter in writing "A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy.") She's fierce, funny, and unwilling to compromise--rare in this day and age when even our finest critics find themselves praising mainstream fodder like Arlington Road, simply because there's nothing better out there.

The book is far from exhaustive; not enough attention is paid to such important directors as Terrence Malick, Atom Egoyan, Terry Gilliam, even Coppola, and too much space is devoted to Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton. I can't imagine why we get her piece on, say, The Long Goodbye, but not Chinatown. But the book also includes numerous articles you wouldn't want to miss: her notes on The Rules of the Game, a long excerpt from The Citizen Kane Book, and reviews of enough now-classic American films (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the aforementioned McCabe...,The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Nashville, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, and, by extension, Once Upon a Time in America, for starters) make one yearn for that period when blockbusters were about ideas. Those days show no sign of return, but they're beautifully recaptured in For Keeps.-Max S. Scheinin

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