Maybe no movie critic has been as influential, or as controversial, as Pauline Kael (1919-2001). The quick documentary Ed and Pauline (2014) explores Kael’s early writing life by specializing in her profitable partnership with – and transient 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 business insiders such because the filmmaker John Waters, the administrators Christian Bruno and Natalija Vekic reveal Kael’s influence on cinema lovers in California’s Bay Space, earlier than her fame-making stint as a movie critic at The New Yorker journal from 1968 to 1991. Utilizing excerpts from Kael’s programme notes for the small impartial theatre, Bruno and Vekic discover fragments of the idiosyncratic opinions, anti-elitist sensibilities and witty, colloquial voice that made her writing legendary.
