I am distinguishing here between ‘reviewer’ and ‘critic’: in French’s words, ‘Film reviewers work at the front line of criticism.’ Reviewers who have to meet weekly deadlines and stringent word limits are the foot soldiers of the profession. Their words are tied to an occasion: that is, the opening of a new film. Some, though, combine reviewing with the more wide-ranging demands of critics, generating more reflective pieces, their authors not being subject to the pressures of reviewers. French has shown a masterly grasp of both functions.

His professional background includes a long stint at the BBC and writing for various journals, as well as authoring or editing several notable books; but, arguably, it is his long reign at the Observer for which he will be most widely remembered. Carcanet Press is bringing out his collected writings in three volumes, the second of which will be devoted to his reviews. The first, I Found It at the Movies, gathers together a remarkable collection of his longer critical pieces.

The range is perhaps what strikes one first. There are essays on such diverse film-related themes as coal-mining or the English male, the Cold War or the Addams Family, how books are used as signifiers of film characters, or how boxers, the Spanish Civil War, or prison life have been represented in film. My randomly chosen selection of topics is meant to suggest the eclecticism of French’s responsiveness to what film has to offer. He has a gift for perceiving such recurring motifs and preoccupations across genres and decades.

The diversity of such interests, and how French draws on them to focus on individual films and trends, throws revealing light on two of his major strengths. First, his grasp of film history enables him to pursue an idea not just across the decades, but across national frontiers as well. Take his essay on ‘Violence in the Cinema’, where he digs back to The Great Train Robbery (1903), which exhibited the first important close-up in film. The final shot of the film depicted ‘a menacing bandit firing his pistol directly into the camera’. This 1965 essay makes its way from 1903, via The Cheat (1919), in which a man ‘branded his adulterous wife with a red-hot iron’, to the fashionable Bond age of the mid-1960s. Or take ‘Venice as a Backdrop’, which sprawls productively over the decades from the studio-built canals of Top Hat (1934), via Summertime (1955), in which American spinster Katharine Hepburn falls backwards into an actual canal, and the spooky use of its labyrinthine ways in Don’t Look Now (1973), to The Wings of the Dove (1997), when the gorgeous setting throws the human machinations into stark relief.

Just as impressive, though, is the ease and authority with which French situates film in the larger processes of cultural change. As you read some film reviewers and critics, you can begin to feel they have spent their formative years, if not their entire lives, in darkened rooms, unaware that there are other art forms, let alone politics and war and injustices of every hue – that is, life – going on out there. Again and again these essays impress the reader with their comprehensive attention to, and retention of, crucial cultural information.

Also, whereas one sometimes feels that reviewers have relied unduly on press kits to inform them about either relevant film history or world events and culture in its widest sense, in the case of French one feels he has actually lived in and responded to that greater world. Or if he was too young to have known about it at the time, as in the case of the Holocaust, he has read about it in sufficient depth to be able to place films as varied as Pastor Hall (1940) and Schindler’s List (1993) in ‘this complex historical heritage’. That is his phrase, and it sums up his urge and capacity to contextualise. He knows that film is but one way of coming to terms with tumultuous events.

About other critics and reviewers he is both astute and generous. For instance, he salutes Pauline Kael’s ‘passionate nature’ and the way ‘her collections are presented as reports on the state of the national morale’, though I would argue that he achieves this sort of effect less obtrusively. Or take the ‘Sunday ladies’, C.A. Lejeune, writing for the Observer (1928–60) and Dilys Powell for the Sunday Times (1936–76): they are recalled with affection and admiration for their pioneering status, as he writes of their collected reviews (also published by Carcanet). Again, I am made to feel uneasy at having dismissed Lejeune too summarily for being remorselessly ‘witty’ at the expense of serious appraisal. French makes the point that such reviewers rarely get their due, because their work is seen not in any sort of totality but only as it suits the purposes of other writers who know nothing of the ‘exigencies of weekly journalism’.

The essays gathered together here reveal an historical sense that neither Powell nor Lejeune could emulate. It is not as if French writes with solemnity; nor does he parade his erudition, either about film or the other arts or the world that houses and inspires them. There is instead a bracing freshness about his perception, whether it is a matter of a close-up or a panoramic view of the Great Depression – and the crime film. There is also an unforced wit at work. In an essay entitled ‘The Ring Cycle: Boxers in the Movies’, he writes: ‘Just when you thought it was safe to dismantle the ring, British moviemakers have got their gloves on again and are tapping the old claret.’ This introduces a discussion initiated by the 1997 films The Boxer and TwentyFourSeven, and an analysis of why boxing pictures may be an exception to the rule that sports films are dubious box office. He goes on to say, ‘Like Brecht, boxing is currently unfashionable and politically incorrect, and there is a widespread demand for its abolition’, but ‘despite this, boxing (and boxing films), like Brecht again, have endured.’

As well as such pieces that ramify  in surprising and rewarding directions, there are reviews of important books on film, and tributes to individual film-makers. Tributes, that is, compounded of critical insights and sometimes of firsthand knowledge of the film-maker concerned. His obituary for Lindsay Anderson, ‘an ascetic, romantic Scot, a malcontent and an anarchist with a well-deserved reputation as a difficult man’, is a model of assessment tempered with admiration.

Any writer on film who wants to be both rigorous and popular should study this book closely. Any reader who just wants to be better informed about film, and entertained at the same time, should do the same.