Long ago, I had a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael. It wasn't very useful or interesting to me. I wasn't surprised that some critics liked her work, but why did they like it so much?
I just read a several articles written over the years about her. One was on a Feminist website and thought being female and obnoxious made her a Feminist heroine. Others pointed out her ethical problems (reviewing movies she consulted on), her inability to understand complex movies, that David Lean didn't make a movie for fourteen years after an especially unpleasant meeting with her. She knew nothing about film technique and therefore claimed that readers had no interest in that.
When Christopher Hitchens died, a couple of people observed that he had an outsized influence over his followers because he never showed the slightest self-doubt.
Around that time, I read a couple of articles about Robert McKee that said the same thing about him. He would make pronouncements that were clearly wrong---in one case he claimed that all horror movies had the same structure---but people would buy every word.
It sounds like Pauline Kael belongs in the same category. She was often wrong, she actually damaged people's careers and therefore cinema itself, but seemed so positive about any thought that flashed in her mind, she must have been right.
They're still talking about her, but her influence died with her. If you're a critic, no matter how many books of movie reviews you leave in your wake, when you're gone, you're gone.
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