Rosenbaum’s willingness to put these difficulties on the table is one of the many attributes that identify him as the most consistently useful American film critic of his generation: endlessly inquisitive, plainspoken to a fault, a tireless booster of his favourite underrated directors, and a living rebuke to the tedium of turf wars between journalists and academics, or between bloggers and writers in print. Assembling essays written across four decades, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia testifies to Rosenbaum’s ability to move between different contexts (and countries), while his frankness about the opportunities and limitations of each venue makes his work a goldmine of rhetorical strategies that other writers can adapt for their own use.

At his best, Rosenbaum has the rare ability to give a clear and convincing yet open-ended account of the formal principles that determine a film’s vision – both what it looks at and how it sees. These principles are then interrogated for what he calls their ‘metaphysical’ implications: in a splendid review of Jacques Tati’s little-known video feature Parade (1973), he deduces an entire philosophy from Tati’s method of filming a series of variety acts, concentrating on the audience as much as the performers, as if making no distinction between the two.

In style and temperament, Rosenbaum is more plodding and systematic than Raymond Durgnat or Manny Farber, two of his early comrades-in-arms; still, he is less a critical big game hunter (to borrow one of his own metaphors) than a cartographer tracing maps of unknown lands. His gift for drawing lines and making evaluations is paradoxically accompanied by a penchant for films that erase boundaries and hierarchies, blending fiction and documentary (like Parade), or resisting interpretation to the point of turning the spectator into an active collaborator. Conversely, he has little patience with the pessimism of film-makers (from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Woody Allen) whose characters seem hopelessly trapped by social or cosmic forces. If he approves the depiction of an ‘incoherent, malevolent universe’ in Fritz Lang’s pulp thriller Spione (1928), it is perhaps because Lang’s vision is dehumanised enough to offer its own kind of escape, into pure abstraction.

Both a formalist and a humanist, Rosenbaum evidently yearns to unite both aspects of his sensibility, a utopian impulse that finds its ultimate expression in his repeated celebration of Tati’s populist masterpiece Playtime (1967). Sometimes he writes as if narrative itself were an enemy, with its determining, foreclosing logic: hence his brash defence of ‘spoilers’, which might otherwise seem snobbish to viewers (like me) who value plot surprise. Perhaps for the same reason, the essays in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia are arranged thematically rather than chronologically; yet in its fragmentary way the book can be understood as a polemical history of cinematic spectatorship, focused especially on parallels between the 1960s and the present day. The recurring thesis is that some of the radical, communal ideals of Rosenbaum’s own youth have been reborn in new forms on the Internet; both then and now, sharing thoughts and feelings about cinema serves as a key way of expressing solidarity (or ‘complicity’, to use a favourite Rosenbaum word).

Rosenbaum once defined the two great subjects of the French film-maker Jacques Rivette as ‘collectivity and solitude’; he could equally have been writing about himself. At times his idealism elides certain issues: the exact relation between cinephilic subcultures and broader currents of 1960s radicalism, the question of how far film viewing can be more than metaphorically liberating, and how far cinephilia by necessity remains a cargo cult. More ambivalence surfaces in his brilliant ‘What Dope Does to Movies’, an unusual essay that traces the passage from collectivity to solitude as both an historical shift – from hippies passing joints down the aisle at screenings of Yellow Submarine (1968) to the more passive, privatised ‘trips’ offered by theme park rides such as Star Wars (1977) – and as an intrinsic part of the pot experience, if not the very nature of spectatorship.

The hard truth is that cinema belongs to nearly everyone, while cinephilia is the passion of a select few. To be sure, Rosenbaum is aware that the freedom promised by new film communities built around ‘websites, blogs and chatgroups’ remains as far from the transformation of public space envisaged in Playtime as it is from the communal, if scarcely liberating, high available at 3-D screenings of Avatar. His faith in a global community of like-minded souls is mirrored by his alienation from many of his fellow citizens, a dichotomy that has its comic side: glimpsing an advertisement for The Cat in the Hat (2003) in his local post office, Rosenbaum wildly reflects that ‘the Stalinist dream of a planned culture may have been realised more thoroughly in contemporary America than it ever was in Russia’.

But ifRosenbaum occasionally casts himself as a politicised version of Tati’s bumbling M. Hulot, he has something in common, too, with the hero of John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953): Judge Priest (Charles Winniger), a revered figure who nonetheless stands apart from the community he serves and guides. Infused with memories of his own Southern childhood, Rosenbaum’s appreciation of this film is one of his strongest and most moving recent essays, hinting at an identification that relates to the particular solitude of the writer, as opposed to the spectator (or film-maker).

A critic, too, is a judge and a kind of preacher: hard at work on verdicts after the crowds have gone home, tapping away on his keyboard behind the closed door.