Rex Reed, Sharp-Tongued Film Critic, Dies at 87

Rex Reed, the influential and often acerbic film critic who helped shape the post–Pauline Kael era, died May 12 in Manhattan at age 87 after a short illness. A longtime writer for The New York Times, GQ, Esquire, Vogue and the New York Observer, he was a fixture on talk shows in the 1960s and ’70s for his wit and candor; he also acted in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, which he called a train wreck and which earned infamy for its controversial gender-bending casting.