Over the years, that is, Ms. Kael’s quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.

Ms. Kael writes as a member of the contemporary film audience—a passionate, female member. Her erudition is impressive, as is her accumulation of personal emotional experiences collected in dark theaters during a lifetime of moviegoing. She has strong prejudices and pronounced preferences, which she is prepared to change if she has to. Thus, Robert Altman, a former favorite for whose Nashville she wrote a dithyrambic review after seeing a rough assembly of the film, is severely mauled in this volume for two recent pictures: A Wedding is “a busted bag of marbles” and Quintet “is like a Monty Python show played at the wrong speed.”

The New Yorker has encouraged or at least permitted Ms. Kael to write at unusual length. Where her love or hate is particularly strong she is inclined to overwrite. Yet most of her collected reviews are absorbing—whether or not one has seen the film she is covering. There is an intensity and a sensuality about her reactions to films and actors that give the reader a vivid and positively voluptuous sense of participation.