Have You Seen...?, By David Thomson

David Thomson is the world's leading sage about film. Dulwich-educated and now living in San Francisco, he's a polymath rather than a critic. His works include biographies of Orson Welles and David O Selznick, major considerations of Warren Beatty and (Thomson's dream girl) Nicole Kidman, and the brilliant Suspects, in which he imagined the off-screen lives of characters from Hollywood's golden age. His New Biographical Dictionary of Film is a masterpiece of analysis, detail and strikingly personal judgements. His The Whole Equation was nothing less than a history of Hollywood.

About the only thing he hasn't given us is his opinion of the actual movies. Until now. Have You Seen...? is half a million words long, over 1,000 pages, and deals with 1,000 films. Just as Thomas Macaulay was supposedly the last man to have read every worthwhile book published, Thomson may be the last critic to have seen every worthwhile movie from the Lumière brothers' L'Arrosseur Arrossé (1895) onwards.

It soon becomes clear that this isn't Thomson's selection of favourites. He's often scathing about acknowledged masterpieces: on Visconti's Death in Venice, "you can measure the shift from one man intent on making a masterpiece to something like a monstrous parody... by the Monty Python boys". Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is "a thinking man's epic (without the thought)" and Peter O'Toole's performance "insufferably swish, without ever really examining homosexuality." He puts them on display to bring them down to size, like a headmaster at assembly.

Not that all the entries are reviews. Sometimes he uses his 500 words to recall the shooting schedule, or how much a project cost. Or he'll tell you who turned down which role, who was fired, who stepped into the breach. He may rhapsodise over a single performance, like that of Jeanne Moreau walking moodily through the streets of Paris to Miles Davis's jazz score in L'Ascenseur pour L'Echafaud: "At 29, Moreau had a face where the toughness and the pathos (not to say the eroticism) were in perfect balance". Or he'll just be plain perverse. On Citizen Kane, about which every film critic in history has discussed the avant-garde boldness of the camerawork, Thomson gives us a sentimental homily on (yawn) Kane's dying word, "Rosebud".

His insights are often delightful. He shrewdly points out that, however pleased we are for James Stewart at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, "after 1946, the US has come to resemble Pottersville far more than Bedford Falls". He points out that the Dennis Price character in Kind Hearts and Coronets must be gay. His rhapsodising over Jean Vigo's L'Atalante is over the top but convinces you to see it as soon as possible.

His praise of technicians and wardrobe mistresses seems typically generous. And he is consistent in condemning well-respected modern American films (Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump) for "intellectual emptiness." It's a book to have on your reference shelf, beside Pauline Kael and the excellent Time Out guide. But I spent more time arguing with the contents than nodding in agreement. Its inclusions and exclusions are baffling. On foreign movies, Thomson is generous to the French New Wave and the Japanese cinema of Kurosawa and Mizogushi; but has a complete blind spot about the explosion of Mexican and south American cinema. So no Amores Perros, no Y Tu Mama Tambien and no (for God's sake) City of God.

His enthusiasm is infectious, but often provocative. Is the end of The Terminator really "one of the great narrative passages in modern effects cinema"? If he likes non-stop action, why isn't Die Hard in here? His schoolboy adoration of Nicole Kidman leads him to hyperventilate over Moulin Rouge, that farrago of substanceless style.

He doesn't like The Shawshank Redemption because he thinks it suggests life in prison isn't so bad – a bizarre judgement. I could spend 500 words just on the scene when Tim Robbins relays Mozart to the jailbirds in the yard, and you can see the word "redemption" practically glowing on their hard faces. He calls Easy Rider "unwatchable" unless you're smoking a joint, and says the same about 2001: A Space Odyssey – an unforgivably casual dismissal of two films which stunned my generation of teens.

How he makes you argue! I may have given the impression of disliking this book. On the contrary: it's hardly been out of my hands for two weeks, and it's a constant source of fascination and pleasure to see what Thomson says about Rear Window or Don't Look Now. It's like having the most film-literate pal you can imagine sitting beside you in a multiplex, showing off his knowledge, provoking you to agreement or (more likely) fury.