More than thousand pages long, appraising one fiction film per page, alphabetically arranged: this is a monster book, by the best-known film encyclopedist since Leslie Halliwell (and much more of a writer than Halliwell ever was). No ratings system, no stars,no illustrations even; they were proposed, but the author resisted. It’s just a whopping text, full of chewy stuff such as “La Dolce Vita now is like an old shoe, ruined, found on a beach. L’Avventura is a fresh footprint, still warm.”

Every reader’s simple instinct will be to plunge into the heart of it, eager for favourites: “What does he think of film X, or Y? Is Z in there at all?” (Yes, Z is there, just before Zabriskie Point.) You can rummage around on that basis for days. Then you might settle down to read the thing sequenti-ally, or not. I did, and enjoyed the experience, though I wouldn’t mind some sort of badge or certificate to mark its completion.

The phrase “a book of this kind” recurs. There have indeed been others, and they haven’t always prospered. Pauline Kael, the critic David Thomson most often quotes, brought out a compendium of capsule reviews, 5001 Nights at the Movies, which is seldom numbered among her best works. But this is rather different — Thomson’s answer to the question he is always hearing: “What should I see?” People ask because he’s the author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, another definitively giant concoction, and in terms of ex-Brits (he lives in San Francisco), he’s the Man Most Likely To Have Seen Everything.

These are not 1,000 favourite motion pictures, though Thomson’s favourites are in there. I’d say these are the films one should see in order to understand where “film culture” fits into the great inter- national flow of culture generally, for good or ill. It follows that conclusions such as, “Yes, you must see this appalling movie” are not only permissible but necessary (the victim here is DW Griffith’s odiously racist The Birth of a Nation). I’m less happy with the logic that says “I think you’d have to include The Dirty Dozen in this book if only on commercial grounds”, but Thomson is keen not to be seen as an unworldly, intellectualising critic. He embraces not just the marketplace, frequently giving figures for a film’s takings, but the Academy awards as well.

The book’s chronology shows that its earliest entry is Lumière’s 1895 film L’Arroseur Arrosé (strangely misspelt), while no fewer than seven films from 2007 illuminate the present day. On the way, French cinema gets a good workout. One finds little sequen-ces of titles suggesting what riches are there: Quai des Brumes, Quai des Orfèvres and Les Quatre Cents Coups, for example — a challenging triple bill, if you could organise it. Equally, there are runs of films I’d be hard to persuade into a cinema to see: The Ten Commandments (1956), The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, for example.

The sheer toil of the enterprise earns Thomson a perfect right to his moments of cranky confess-ional. We learn which film first put him to sleep (Barry Lyndon, and I sympathise) and which generate personal dreads (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, one of those 2007 pictures, awakens his fear of a stroke). Brief Encounter works for him partly because Celia Johnson “resembles my own mother”. Allied to this candour is his willingness to suspend his own rules of selection, allowing in the odd documentary and — more conten- tiously — television enterprise, ranging from The Sopranos to the Monty Python series. If you’re going to do that, should you not entertain Das Boot and Heimat, from Germany, just for a start?

Certain film figures emerge with an accumulated credit that hasn’t always been theirs. Among actors, Robert Ryan is shown to have had, if not quite enjoyed, a deeply interesting and impressive career, and Jeff Bridges is strikingly proposed as “the essential, if still unknown, actor of modern American cinema”. The cameraman Sam Leavitt seems to have done a great deal of good work, though when I was a film critic his name was not customarily included among the solemn roll call of brilliant cinematographers. The career shared for a while by Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini runs like a soap opera through the book, as do the curious ups and downs of Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and Nicole Kidman, three figures to whom Thomson has devoted separate attention elsewhere.

You have to like a writer quite a lot to live with him this intensely, and fortunately there is a lot to like about Thomson. He is liberal and anti-obscure and, in spite of occasional trouncings (“Everything involving Senta Berger should have been cut”), rather kindly. Without making a point of it, he gives a nice sense of the other 20th-century arts growing up alongside the cinema — jazz in particular. His failings here are those of exhaustion, or eroded nerve, as displayed in his bilious entry for the hapless The Sound of Music: “Yes, you’re right: I am a very sick, vicious old man, but writing 1,000 of these little recommendations can drive you crazy, especially when I come to a picture that I loathe but which — unquestionably — has to be in the book, if only because millions of the stupid and aggrieved will write in to the publisher, ‘Where was The Sound of Music?’ if it is not. It is here.” As this sensible man well knows, it needn’t have been.

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