I CARE ABOUT Miss Kael's criticism as literature," John Leonard, the facile New York Times book critic, is quoted as saying on the inside flap of Reeling, the latest collection of movie reviews from Pauline Kael. Leonard's judgement may strike many as over-blown, or at least as a case of the pot calling the kettle sterling. But people gossip and debate more today about critics and commentators than about the events they cover. Brendan Gill cashed in on this new phenomenon with "Here at the New Yorker," as did Timothy Crouse with "Boys on the Bus." This summer, the scent of profit in this new field brings us a look at office politics at (it's come to this) The Village Voice.

In this critics' golden age, Pauline Kael has unmistakably earned her pedestal. With a gritty, grappling brand of opinionation (and largely because of it), her review slot at the New Yorker has often produced sparkling minor masterpieces. She's become the Chopin of the pan. When she lights into "Lost Horizon," the multi-million dollar clunker in Reeling, it's a virtuoso performance. "To lambast a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge," she writes. "He is to movies what Liberace is to music, and once, on a television talk show, I saw them both. . .and the two unctuous smiles came together. Mr. Bland and Mr. Bland."

Lately, though, the critics of the critics have begun to turn on Kael. After praising her to the skies for a decade (she won a National Book award for her last batch of reviews), they now accuse her of floating a series of "puff pieces." The controversy came to a head a year ago, when she gave herself over to unabashed adulation for Robert Altman's Nashville. She called it "an orgy without excess" and made it sound like a gentle, cinematic orgasm. ("I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness.") Before, her fans had loved her pyrotechnic style and classy sense of nuance, what you might call enthusiasm with bite. Now, they complained, she has lost her bite and runs only on enthusiasm. When she jumped the gun on Nashville and reviewed it before it had been released in its fully-edited form, even dignified Vincent Canby--a man above these intrigues if ever there was one--found space in his Sunday column to admonish Kael for her gleeful hastiness.

In Reeling, then, we get another look at the source of all this controversy. And in most of the reviews (she picks up from her last book in 1972), the magic touch is all there. Her sensibility works like a scalpel, and she pulls off fascinating dissections of a series of good-but-not-great films. Tackling the incomplete aftertaste left by respectable films like Sleeper, Lacombe, Lucien and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she wrestles her feelings down with words. She won't let go until she's pinned down the fine distinctions, until she's exposed all the vacuums. This is the talent overlooked by all those who have resented Kael all along for dictating opinions. They miss the point entirely: we don't learn what to think about films from Kael, we learn how to think about them (and not in academic explication, but in terms of gut reaction). She shows us how to take a reaction like "yeah, it was o.k., but not spectacular" and run with it.

Yet in a number of Reeling's reviews, she loses (or more precisely abandons) this fine cutting edge, perhaps for the first time. Starting with Last Tango in Paris and picking up at the end of the collection with Shampoo, Godfather II and Nashville, Kael does something she's never done before: she lifts her analytical tools from the film itself and begins to sell it to the reader; she seems to ladle on superlatives for the publicists to lap up. About Tango, she writes, miscalculating badly, that "this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies." Shampoo is called "the most virtuoso example of sophisticated, kaleidoscopic farce that American moviemakers have ever come up with." And we've seen the praise heaped on Nashville, in her estimation "the funniestepic vision of America ever to reach the scree." Yet she's not selling out--the real problem goes beyond simple over-enthusiasm.

What really sets these reviews apart from the rest is her private discovery, in each film, of a revolutionary jump in theme or technique, the unexpected tapping of a mother-lode. In Tango, she hits upon the bleak, angry use of explicit sex; in Shampoo, the expansion of the conventional romantic triangle into a romantic pentagon; and in Nashville, the seamless fusion of stylization and a documentary feel. She jumps up and down at these new affects, and never settles down to put her surgeon's tools to work. Sparked by a childlike fascination for film history and change, she tugs at our sleeves and blurts out "look at that, do you realize what's happening?" But sadly, like a zealous child, she underestimates the capacity of yesterday's radical departures to become today's banalities.

All of which only goes to reinforce the fact that nobody cares more genuinely about movies than Kael. They move and compel her to weigh each nuance, to mull over each jarring image, and to track down every pop association like an amateur sociologist-sleuth. She even lifts and carries the torah for the whole creative tradition in her long, worried, and proscriptive essay on the film industry, "On the Future of the Movies." And when she's in top form, Kael merits the hackneyed testimonial, "she cares enough to be brilliant." Hopefully she will weather the hyperbolic fuss over film critics (these are only movie reviews, after all) and get over her recent phase of open-mouthed raptures. Reeling brings together another thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating round of reviews, and hopefully Kael will sustain enough independence and determination to prod our thinking for a few more volumes worth of reviews.