Maxim Gorky, the first major writer to record his impressions of the cinema, wrote in his local newspaper the day after seeing the first Lumière brothers show in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896: "Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there  I was at Aumont's and saw Lumière's cinématographe  moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances." A few years later Rudyard Kipling wrote Mrs Bathurst, the first significant work of fiction inspired by the movies, a mysteriously haunting tale of a sailor driven to his death by a brief newsreel he obsessively views in Cape Town. The new medium had the power to disturb, to fascinate, to generate vast sums of money.

Francine Stock, a former BBC TV current affairs reporter and now presenter of Radio 4's The Film Programme, has taken on the hugely ambitious project of a historical survey of the movies from their first flickerings in the 1890s to this very year. But she calls it, borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey". She further narrows the focus by saying that the book's central idea arose from discussions with her producer on The Film Programme, Stephen Hughes (named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover), after "we had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history".

In the event, it is not a deeply personal book. The passing remarks on Stock's own life rarely get more revealing than watching Chinatown at the age of 16 in Guildford on the same day as the IRA pub bombings there in October 1974, or annual family outings to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which her children now consider "their bildungsroman". And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films. In Flickers, his "Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema", Gilbert Adair wrote brief, scintillating essays on one film each year from 1895 (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) to 1994 (Tim Burton's Ed Wood). Stock takes three films each decade from the 1910s to the 2000s, a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics. Each chapter begins with a few words on the character of the decade before discursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades when she deals with the cinema, its psychopathology, and changing perceptions of the world. She can start with Gold Diggers of 1933, slip into Gracie Fields and Batman and end up with Meryl Streep "in the record-breakingly successful Mamma Mia!".

Stock and Stephen Hughes are, I believe, mistaken in believing that the influence of films on everyday life has gone unexplored. This is borne out in their own bibliography, as well as the books they don't include, such as Robert Sklar's Movie-Made America and the endless personal accounts of moviegoing written over the past 30 years. These memoirs are a fairly recent development. Back in the 1970s the formidable American literary critic Diana Trilling told me how early in her career a patriotic Hollywood B-movie called Joe Smith, American, released shortly after Pearl Harbor, had reduced her to tears. She went straight to William Phillips, co-editor of the prestigious quarterly Partisan Review, and suggested writing about this experience. "Diana," he told her sternly, "that's the kind of thing you discuss with your mother. You don't write about it in Partisan Review."

A major change in public taste was to occur in the 1960s, spearheaded by, among others, Susan Sontag, and brought about by pop art, the merging of highbrow and lowbrow cultures, auteurism and postmodernism. One's response to films like Joe Smith, American became precisely what one wrote about in Partisan Review. This explains moviegoing memoirs ranging from the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman's My Life in the Silver Screen and Gore Vidal's Screening History to works by current British film critics like John Walsh, Antonia Quirke and Mark Kermode.

It also explains how a canon of classic pictures, that had been established internationally in the 30s and 40s by critics and film historians including Paul Rotha and Roger Manvell in Britain and Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach in France, was suddenly set aside, creating the kind of void that Stock seeks to fill. In Glorious Technicolor features a dust-jacket picture of Erich von Stroheim as the crazy Norma Desmond's chauffeur in Sunset Boulevard but has no reference to him in the text as one of the greatest directors of the silent era. There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker and an account of what it is like to sit on stage with him, watching an audience in 3D goggles transfixed by Avatar.

Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined. Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night. But she makes up for this by coining a valuable new word. In the proof copy of her book she refers to the fashionably deranged vision of the "photagonist" of Cronenberg's Spider. Sadly this is changed to "protagonist" in the corrected version.