NEW YORK (AP) --

Movie critic Pauline Kael, a brash, witty champion of artistic quality who thrashed both facile commercialism and self-indulgent pretense from her lofty perch at The New Yorker, has died. She was 82.

Kael, a resident of Great Barrington, Mass., suffered from Parkinson's disease. Perri Dorset, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said Kael died Monday at her home. She had retired from The New Yorker in 1991.

David Remnick, the magazine's editor, said that Kael broke down barriers between low and high cinema in her reviews, delighting in both the sublime and the profane.

"She shaped American film criticism for generations to come and, more important, the national understanding of the movies," Remnick said.

She turned "The Current Cinema" into a leading fixture in The New Yorker, one of the most influential magazines among the nation's cultural elite.

Physically petite but mighty in her opinions, she became one of the 20th century's most important and recognizable film critics. She called the movies "our national theater" and helped establish the reputations of such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg.

Her 1969 essay "Trash, Art and the Movies," written for Harper's magazine, was named in 1999 as No. 42 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

She wrote her first review in 1953 for a San Francisco magazine, panning Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight" as "Slimelight." Over the years, her work appeared in Film Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Vogue, the New Republic, and McCall's. She began writing her punchy, conversational, sometimes slangy prose for The New Yorker in 1967.

Larry McMurtry deemed her the "Edmund Wilson of film reviewers." Writer Martin Knelman once said she packed such diverse personal, social, commercial and artistic insights into her writings that they were often more entertaining than the movies she reviewed. She was endowed with a prodigious memory and knowledge of cinema, able to accurately report plot and dialogue despite not taking notes during screenings.

Her views often defied popular taste. She left McCall's after sounding off about "The Sound of Music" in an article headlined "The Sound of Money." She thought "Rain Man" a "wet piece of kitsch." She dismissed "Dances With Wolves" as a "nature-boy movie" and famously mocked director-star Kevin Costner as "having feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."

But she equally disdained what she saw as pretension masquerading as high art. She had contempt for movies like "Last Year at Marienbad" and "Blow-Up." Of the latter, she wrote that director Michelangelo Antonioni "loads his atmosphere with so much confused symbolism and such a heavy sense of importance that the viewers use the movie as a Disposall for intellectual refuse."

A tireless polemicist, she did not shy from flogging people or ideas that she found foolish. She picked apart the trendy "auteur" theory of film that exalted a director's stylistic and thematic fixations, instead of plot or a movie's individuality. Her attacks led to an often bitter feud with fellow critic Andrew Sarris.

"What she loved ... is an appeal of motion pictures that is ultimately a primitive one ... that goes back to the role of motion pictures as sheer entertainment. She did not subscribe to the notion that movies had to be good for you," said Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia University.

Kael deeply admired films such as "Bonnie and Clyde," "Weekend," "The Godfather," "MASH," "The Garden of the Finzi Continis," and "Mean Streets." She likened "Last Tango in Paris" to "Rite of Spring," calling it "a departure from everything we've come to expect at the movies. ... the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made."

Among older films her favorites included Jean Renoir's "La Grande Illusion," D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance," Preston Sturges' "Unfaithfully Yours" and the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup."

Consistently, she defended artistic creativity, subtlety and refined craftsmanship, qualities she worried were endangered. In a 1980 essay, "Why are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers," she wrote that "The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers; they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible for the prearranged and anticipated deals."

In an Associated Press interview in 1989, she lamented, "You can't get college kids interested in going to any sort of daring movie now. They're perfectly willing to sit through the same old crap, a larger version of what they've seen on television all their lives. They may even resent it if they go to a film that has subtitles, or that has any kind of complexity."

Although she ridiculed the auteur theory, she was a longtime admirer of many directors, including Renoir, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard and Satyajit Ray. Marlon Brando, James Mason, Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda were among her favorite actors.

Kael also loved the films of Orson Welles, but she enraged the director by writing that he had contributed little to the Oscar-winning screenplay for "Citizen Kane" and plotted to receive sole credit at the expense of collaborator Herman J. Mankiewicz. Welles denied her allegations, and several friends and admirers defended him.

She wrote more than 10 books, including her breakthrough 1965 work of collected reviews, "I Lost It at the Movies," and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang." Her "Deeper Into Movies" won a National Book Award in 1974. In 2000, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Born in Petaluma, Calif., she lived on a farm during her early years. Her father was a movie fan, and she developed into an avid reader and movie enthusiast.

She studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1936 to 1940, majoring in philosophy. She did not earn her degree at the time but later in life was granted an honorary doctorate.

For a time, she tried experimental film-making, writing plays and managing film houses. She sometimes did odd jobs to survive.

During Kael's career, her personal life sometimes suffered. She had multiple marriages and divorces.

After her retirement, she returned to her rural roots at a home in Great Barrington, a Berkshire Mountain resort town.