Sometimes, when it comes to penning obituaries, enthusiasm is a duty, or at least an effort of memory or mental manoeuvre. One admires from afar, distanced not just by a death but by a life that never quite made that person-to-person connection.

With Pauline Kael, who died on Monday aged 82, the response can be heartfelt, spontaneous and in this writer's case personal. Kael's magnificent film reviews for the New Yorker did more than anything to persuade me that writing about cinema could be exciting and fulfilling, and that the best critics put themselves into their craft as surely as the best poets or novelists do. She wrote fullbloodedly, wittily, above all honestly. The reader never believed she was pretending to an opinion she didn't have. She could astonish one with the breadth of her enthusiasms - from Renoir to Tarantino, from Bertolucci to Fiddler on the Roof - while delighting one with the boldness of her iconoclasm.

Hallowed European directors could feel the sharp point of her pen as surely as lowly Hollywood hacks. She dismissed one earnest art movie with "I didn't much like Wild Strawberries the first time" (though she came on-side for Bergman's Persona and Cries and Whispers). And on the second of two occasions when I met and talked to her - five years ago in the wood-frame home in Massachusetts where she had retired with Parkinson's disease - she sighed of the acclaimed New Chinese Cinema, "When I hear the title Red Sorghum my whole body wilts."

A few minutes earlier, by contrast, when I threw a Danish name into the pot, she sat up and said, "Oh I love von Trier." And the sadness is that she wasn't around to shake the subtitle-resistant US into adoring Europa, Breaking the Waves or The Kingdom, as she had earlier shaken it into sharing her love of Godard.

Born in Petaluma, California, on June 19 1919, she grew up on the west coast. In Berkeley she ran her own art cinema, where directors were invited to jaw with audiences in informal seminars. She wrote her first review in 1953 for a San Francisco magazine.

Kael never cut herself off from either film-goers or film-makers. In the 1970s, after moving to the New Yorker, she supported directors such as Coppola, De Palma, Altman and Scorsese not just with her prose but with the almost personal loyalty of herself and the - at times notorious - "Paulettes". These were her private army of film buffs, some of whom I met in my first Kael encounter, a dinner in New York to which I was invited as if to witness the queen wasp playing to her wannabe heirs.

It was slightly frightening, as were other aspects of her career. After transforming the New Yorker's genteel review columns with her racy prose - she memorably defined An Officer and a Gentleman as "crap, but crap on amotorcycle" - Kael became a kind of fuhrer of sophisticated Manhattan opinion. Movie-makers duly staged reprisals. In the post-Star Wars George Lucas film Willow the supervillain is called General Kael. And with an unholy glee Hollywood watched her own failed sortie into the industry, a Paramount consultancy which she surrendered soon after taking it up in 1979.

Returning to reviewing, she proved again that no writer on film could touch her for vitality, immediacy and brilliantly marshalled argument. She could build or destroy the case for a movie in plain words that never became plain prose, over long pages that never seemed long in the reading. Anyone who hasn't read a collection of Pauline Kael's reviews - nearly all now in book form - doesn't know the heights to which that often maligned trade, film criticism, can reach.

Married and divorced three times, Kael is survived by her daughter, Gina James, and a grandson.