Well, I`m 66,'' says Pauline Kael, punctuating the information with one of the little sighs that forever pepper her conversation. ''I`ve got a bum heart, and I faint. The other night, I was having dinner with some young writer friends in New York and when we went to get a cab on Broadway, I just collapsed and had to be dragged into the cab. It happens every once in a while, when I`m overtired.''

Nevertheless, the woman who virtually reshaped the vocabulary of movie criticism through her own informed, eloquent, insightful and opinionated work does not seem to be slowing up for a moment. In spite of the heart problems she had to deal with two years ago, she still sees ''about six movies for every one I review,'' her writing still appears every other week under the

''Cinema'' heading in The New Yorker, and this month, ''State of the Art,''

her 10th book, containing her reviews from 1983 through the summer of 1985, is in the book stores in hard cover and paperback.

Many of the movies she sees these days are not good, she believes, and most of the pictures she has seen for the Christmas season ''are terrible.''

But that has dulled neither her wit nor her fierce intelligence.

In The New Yorker, she has just filed a singular minority opinion on

''Shoah,'' the otherwise universally admired, 9 1/2-hour documentary on the Holocaust. ''I made it through five hours and gave up,'' she says. ''I just don`t think it`s very good. It`s a very narrow-minded, slackly made movie.''

And, asked if she had seen the film version of ''A Chorus Line,'' she sighs again. ''It`s such a self-pitying musical. Pity me, I`m out of a job. Pity me, I`m poor. Pity, me, I`m gay. Oh, please . . . .''

As she explains in her introduction to this latest collection, she has purposely picked a title that eschews ''the sexually tinged titles'' of her earlier books (''I Lost It at the Movies,'' ''Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,''

''Reeling,'' etc.) because ''this has not been a period for anything like

`Grand Passions.` ''

The state of the art, she believes, ''is low. The technical effects are pretty good, but there`s a blandness and dullness of mind about the movies themselves. The process of the conglomerates` takeover of the movies has accelerated, and the changeover in executives has been so fast in the last few years that they don`t want to do anything that isn`t absolutely safe. Any kind of originality scares them, and interesting projects they might have inherited are dumped.

''So what you get are movies like `Ghostbusters` and `Beverly Hills Cop`

with a couple of dumb laughs in them that people go to see because they`ve heard they`re hits. There used to be hits like `The Hustler` and `On the Waterfront` and `The Godfather` that had substance. And there was a quick wit to some of those movies of the `70s like `Mean Streets` and `Carrie` and `Taxi Driver,` but now you have this flag-draping over the heroes and all you read about is Sylvester Stallone. God, I`m so sick of reading about Sylvester Stallone.''

And there is the problem of drugs in the industry. ''It`s there,'' Kael says. ''You can see it in the work. Maybe it`s because there`s so much money floating around. But also it has to be the pressure of waking up every morning and believing you have to create a hit. Just think of what kind of pressure that puts you under.''

Despite this, Kael believes good movies, movies that she likes, continue to be made, ''if you can see them or read about them.'' Movies that have captured her favor in recent months have ranged from mainstream works such as John Huston`s ''Prizzi`s Honor'' and Woody Allen`s ''The Purple Rose of Cairo'' to small movies such as ''The Re-Animator,'' the low-budget horror movie directed by Chicagoan Stuart Gordon, and the Willie Nelson-Kris Kristofferson ''Songwriter,'' directed by Alan Rudolph.

The advent of the videocassette recorder is great for some of these movies, she realizes, because ''people have a chance to see a movie like

`Songwriter` or `Sweet Dreams` (with Jessica Lange as country singer Patsy Kline) that they might have missed in the theaters.''

For herself, however, ''I stick to going to the movies.'' Four days every other week, she goes into Manhattan from her home in Massachusetts to take care of the business of seeing movies. When she returns home, she writes her reviews in longhand. Her daughter Gina, who lives about 10 minutes away, then types them up, allowing Kael time to play with her 3 1/2-year-old grandson William. ''I`m a very proper grandmother,'' she says, fishing in her handbag for the latest snapshots of beaming grandma and grandson.

When she travels back to Manhattan, she brings in her latest reviews and checks the proofs on the material about to be published. Also, she answers the mail. ''The review on `Witness.` '' She laughs. ''That got a lot of mail (she had referred to the Harrison Ford thriller about a wounded policeman sheltered by an Amish community as ''so virtuous it`s condemning itself''). It was a movie of such bland goodness, and it was made in an official style that high school principals and editorial writers could admire.

''Sometimes I think I`m more the maverick than ever. The press in general gets so enthusiastic about some of these things. Editors seem to want more and more features endorsing the big hits.''

In her own reviews, Kael says, ''I give the immediate space to the movies worth seeing. There was no hurry in writing about `Rambo.` Sometimes, you wonder, `Is there anything left to say about this?` I`ve written about `Rocky` three times, and, except for the first one, which had a little oddball charm to it, they`re all the same movie. What more can I say? I mean, after all, there are just limits. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.''

Over the period covered in ''State of the Art,'' Kael has had some disappointments in the work of directors she had previously encouraged and admired.

''Five or six of the movies Brian De Palma made are really special,'' she says. '' `Blow Out,` with John Travolta, was a wonderful political thriller. But `Scarface` (De Palma`s 1983 version, with Al Pacino in the title role)

just seemed to come apart. I lost interest when F. Murray Abraham (who portrayed ''an anxious pockmarked creep'') went out of the movie or when Michelle Pfeiffer (as Pacino`s drugged-out WASP wife) left the scene.''

Francis Ford Coppola, whom Kael had praised for such earlier works as