Who'd be so dim? Who'd let themselves in for this fiesta of trivia, this litany of letdown, this bleary bill of bum-ache and banality? Who, in short, would volunteer to be Philip French, film critic of this parish since 1978 and all-round exemplar of the saintly soul? Like Keith Richards, who says he looks the way he does so that we don't have to, French spends several days of the week holed up in subterranean Soho so that we might get on with our lives unthreatened by the monster that is the movies.

Given that they are the product of what French calls "an industry established to provide entertainment for the semi-literate urban masses", it is little wonder that the great majority of films are bad. As Wolcott Gibbs told readers of the New Yorker: "99% of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum." That was in 1944, the year that gave us Meet Me in St Louis, Laura, Double Indemnity and To Have and Have Not. If Gibbs couldn't enjoy himself then, how would he cope now, as his latterday counterparts brace themselves for Kung Fu Panda 2, Mission: Impossible  Ghost Protocol and, oh yes, Final Destination 5?

French quotes Gibbs in "Goodbye to All What?", an essay subtitled "On giving up film criticism" written for Sight and Sound in 1966 and now reprinted in the first of what will be three volumes of his selected journalism. The inspiration for the piece was Kenneth Tynan's resignation, after little more than a year, from this paper's film column. As a theatre critic with a swingeing style, Tynan had been used to closing shows overnight. Alas, he wrote in a valedictory note, not even the punchiest movie critic could hope to compete "with the vast advertising techniques that ensure a mass audience" for clunker after clunker. Well, maybe, says French, who is adamant that it had been plain from Tynan's column that "the cinema was providing him with rapidly diminishing stimulation".

Not so French who, 47 years on from the earliest essay collected here, is still in love with everything about the movies. Hence one of the virtues of this book is the catholicity of its interests. A piece on the cop pictures of the mid-70s (which ascribes their popularity to the "Vietnam fiasco") is followed by a paean to Ealing comedy. An analysis of the changing iconography of the English gentleman gives way to a rumination on the cinema's seemingly inbuilt propensity for representing violence. A hilarious hommage to French cinephile Henri Langlois sits next to a tribute to the many and varied talents of Doris Day.

Many of these pieces were written in the mid-1960s and early 70s, the high-water mark of the auteur theory, which argued that movies have authors and that we call those authors directors. French isn't so sure. Like "our best critic of the arts" (French on the late David Sylvester, in the book's heartfelt opening piece), he knows that the man who did most for postwar British cinema wasn't a director but a set designer  Ken Adam. He knows that actors, writers, editors and all the other titles to be read in the end credits play their part too.

Above all, he knows that movie directors are rather like managing directors: necessary, but not sufficient, for the success of an operation. So while a couple of the essays collected here  on John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock  nod their heads at the auteurist altar, French is careful never to write in praise of solitary genius. The Hitchcock piece in particular is concerned less with artistic afflatus than with locating the master of suspense in the traditions of Englishness that even his most America-centred work sprang from.

There is much to be learned in a book that cements French's reputation as one of the best film historians around. Its successor will be a collection of French's reviews proper. The best critics are entertainers as well as educators, worth reading even if you don't know the object under review. French is justly proud that the opening line of his essay on British cinema and the Post Office  "I don't know much about philately, but I know what I lick"  made it into the Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Quotations, but his prose is too positivist for the flourish of rhetoric. Still and all, five'll get you 10 that anyone fancying a night at the cinema would be better off staying in with I Found It at the Movies. Its words are worth a thousand pictures.