The peerless, fearless, inimitable Pauline Kael singlehandedly turned movie reviewing into a popular art form in 1965 with I Lost it at the Movies. As critic of The New Yorker she has been going full tilt ever since. Hooked is her ninth collection (and eleventh book), and it brings together all her reviews from July 1985 to June 1988. The scope is wide—Out of Africa, The Color Purple, Dirty Dancing, Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters, Platoon, Hope and Glory, Broadcast News, Top Gun, Fatal Attraction, The Last Emperor, A World Apart, Bull Durham . . . more than 175 movies in all. Thus she continues with what turns out to be the longest running, most entertaining, and most illuminating career in the history of movie reviewing.

Readers coming to Pauline Kael for the first time will soon discover that her reviews belong in a category uniquely hers. As Anatole Broyard remarked in a review of her "Deeper into Movies" in The New York Times: "Her typical piece not only evaluates the movie itself . . . Reading a Pauline Kael review gives you a pretty good idea of the current state of our morality, our politics—and, yes, I might as well say it: our souls."