Stanley Kauffmann, legendary film and theater critic, dies at 97 Stanley Kauffmann, a reviewer of movies and theater who was one of the world's longest-working critics and became known for his high-minded, impassioned, often rebellious tastes, died Oct. 9 at a hospital in New York. He was 97. The New Republic, which had published Mr. Kauffmann's reviews since 1958, announced his death. The cause was pneumonia. (Courtesy of the New Republic) - Film critic Stanley Kauffmann During a career spanning eight decades, Mr. Kauffmann became deeply entrenched in the nation's cultural firmament. He wrote for influential publications, including the New York Times (where he worked briefly as the newspaper's theater critic), the Saturday Review and the New American Review. He was one of the few critics who could watch a 1997 Broadway play featuring Christopher Plummer portraying the talented but troubled actor John Barrymore - and remember seeing Barrymore onstage shortly before his death in 1942. Mr. Kauffmann was an editor at Bantam Books, Ballantine and Alfred A. Knopf publishing houses in the 1940s and 1950s and was credited with discovering such acclaimed novels as Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer." A Shakespearean actor in the 1930s, Mr. Kauffmann spent years teaching at the Yale School of Drama and other academic centers. He left his most enduring mark as a movie critic, a role to which he brought a drama lover's perspective of structure, narrative and character development. He could be droll and incisive about a director or performer, and he used his voracious cultural appetite to make thematic connections between movies - the most populist art form - and literature. In short, he wanted Americans to take movies as seriously as they would fine art. To Mr. Kauffmann, the most fundamental quality in his profession was "moral rigor - a commitment to the art, a passion to see it improve, a disregard for any kind of popularity." His tenure began decades before the advent of simplified thumbs-up, thumbs-down reviewing popularized by movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Mr. Kauffmann's pedagogical approach made him unfashionable at times as hip movie conversations turned to "auteur" theory (emphasizing the role of director as the prime architect of a film) and later focused on the sociological or political implications of film. Mr. Kauffmann may have lacked the prominence of Pauline Kael at the New Yorker or Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice, but he was nonetheless a central player in the passionate arguments about film aesthetics that in the 1960s and "70s filled pages of publications noted for their long-form, provocative cultural criticism. In the 1960s, he coined the term "film generation" to describe the phenomenon of young film fanatics who rushed to the bijou to see the latest offerings from avant-garde European directors including Jean-Luc Godard and the occasional American maverick such as Sam Peckinpah. "He was passionately engaged with film's highest aspirations as an art form and was at his most eloquent when films were most complex," said Nell Minow, an author and movie critic. He educated generations of film-watchers and filmmakers about how and what to watch.