Movie critic Mary Pols’(s) first movie was “Bambi.” She sat on her big sister Elizabeth’s lap. She cried.

She rarely returned to the movie theater until she was a teenager, mostly because her father thought movies were an abomination, with the exception of Peter Sellers’ “Pink Panther” series. However, while browsing for good cartoons in her mother’s New Yorkers she discovered Pauline Kael’s reviews and decided that Kael had the most enticing job on earth.

It took her roughly 25 years to get that job however. She became the Contra Costa Times critic in 2000, having worked for a decade as a news reporter. She writes for all of MediaNews Group’s Bay Area News Group properties, including the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times and San Jose Mercury News.

She graduated from Duke University, where she majored in art history, and has a master’s from Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 2005-2006, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she studied film and writing. She is a founder and past president of the American Women Film Journalists.

If banished to a desert island equipped with a miraculously functional DVD player, and told she could take the complete works of only two filmmakers with her, she could make do with the complete works of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Judd Apatow.