Roger Ebert argued in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades".

Sanford Schwartz writes that, in the 1960s, she "gave a breathing, textured life to the aims and sensibilities of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among other European and Asian directors; and she endowed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola, among American directors of the following decade, with the same full-bodied presence.

Kael had intended to go to law school, but fell in with a group of artists[12] and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.

[16][14] In 1952, Peter D. Martin,[14] the editor of City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffeeshop with a friend and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952).

[16] In a review of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) that has been ranked among her most memorable,[19] Kael described seeing the film after one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair.

I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie."

[1][21][22] Their marriage soon ended in divorce, but he agreed to pay for Gina's heart surgery, and made Kael the manager of the cinema in 1955, a position she held until 1960.

After mentioning that some of the press had dubbed it "The Sound of Money", she called the film's message a "sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat".

According to Stein, he fired her "months later, after she kept panning every commercial movie from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago to The Pawnbroker and A Hard Day's Night.

Kael remembered "getting a letter from an eminent The New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung".

[40][41] The essay extended Kael's dispute of the auteur theory,[18] arguing that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenplay's coauthor, was virtually its sole author and the film's actual guiding force.

She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.

[48] According to Kael, after reading her unfavorable review of Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, Shawn said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me."

"[51] Adler argued that Kael's post-1960s work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility" and faulted her "quirks [and] mannerisms", including repeated use of "bullying" imperatives and rhetorical questions.

[53] In 1979, Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to be a consultant to Paramount Pictures, but left the position after only a few months to return to writing criticism.

"[3] She often made allusions to other arts; reviewing Jules and Jim, she writes "The film was adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel, written when he was seventy-four ..

In those prim days, when most serious film criticism read like term papers in sociology and most popular reviews read like wire copy, Kael’s writing was the battle cry of a vital and dangerous new era, the equivalent of Little Richard’s primal 'A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom!'

She panned some films that had widespread critical admiration, such as Network,[60] A Woman Under the Influence ("murky, ragmop"),[61] The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,[62] most experimental cinema[63] (calling it "a creature of publicity and mutual congratulations on artistry"), most student films ("freshmen compositions"),[64] It's a Wonderful Life, Shoah[65] ("logy and exhausting"),[66] Dances with Wolves ("a nature boy movie"),[67] and 2001: A Space Odyssey ("monumentally unimaginative").

[72] Kael was an enthusiastic, if occasionally ambivalent, supporter of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill's early work, both of whom specialized in violent action dramas.

Her collection 5001 Nights at the Movies includes favorable reviews of nearly all of Peckinpah's films except The Getaway (1972), as well as Hill's Hard Times (1975), The Warriors (1979), and Southern Comfort (1981).

She called Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), starring Eastwood, a "right-wing fantasy", "a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values",[73] and "fascist medievalism".

First remarked upon by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice, according to gay writer Craig Seligman, the accusations eventually "took on a life of their own and did real damage to her reputation".

[77] In her review, Kael called the straight-themed Rich and Famous "more like a homosexual fantasy", saying that one female character's "affairs, with their masochistic overtones, are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into".

"[79] Seligman has defended Kael, saying that these remarks showed "enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes—in a dark period when other reviewers ... 'felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread.

'"[80] Kael rejected the accusations as "craziness", adding, "I don't see how anybody who took the trouble to check out what I've actually written about movies with homosexual elements in them could believe that stuff.

"[81] In December 1972, a month after U.S. President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, Kael gave a lecture at the Modern Language Association during which she said: "I live in a rather special world.

[95] It was repeatedly alleged that, after her retirement, Kael's "most ardent devotees deliberate[d] with each other [to] forge a common School of Pauline position" before their reviews were written.

[97] Asked in 1998 whether she thought her criticism had affected the way films were made, Kael deflected the question, saying, "If I say yes, I'm an egotist, and if I say no, I've wasted my life".

[49] Several directors' careers were profoundly affected by her, most notably that of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was accepted at UCLA Film School's graduate program on Kael's recommendation.

Very, very good, because she was a terrific journalist who took immense pains to seem spontaneous, who believed that it ought to be possible to write about entertainments in ways that made them more stimulating for thousands of people ... she established for a while something that had not been true since the impact of television — that the movies were ours, that they spoke to and for a society and were the most telling, deeply felt impression of who we were and might be ... as time passes, I suspect she will seem more remarkable, more useful as a measure of her time, and more sexy.