FOR KEEPS: 30 Years at the Movies...

FOR KEEPS: 30 Years at the Movies by Pauline Kael (Plume/Penguin: $19.95, 1291 pp.). This collection of New Yorker reviews from 1961 to 1991 confirms Kael’s reputation as America’s most insightful film critic. She’s not afraid to lambaste Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep and Oliver Stone or praise the early off-beat work of Robert Altman and Robert Zemeckis.

An essay from “Deeper Into the Movies” (1973) seems to anticipate the summer of “Striptease” and “Independence Day”: “We’ve simply spent too much time at movies made by people who didn’t enjoy themselves and who didn’t respect themselves or us, and we rarely enjoy ourselves at their movies anymore. . . . I look at the list of movies playing, and most of them I genuinely can’t face, because the odds are so strong that they’re going to be the same old insulting failed entertainment.”