Here's probably the only time you will see the comparison drawn between Kevin Clerks Smith and that grand old man of French chamber-film, Eric Rohmer. It's the sort of thing journo Jonathan Romney likes to do; finding a way into things, through things. These collected pieces are not strictly reviews, although they were written during a stint as film critic on the New Statesman magazine roughly through the first half of the decade. No, they are as much musings as opinions, their author bouncing ideas off of himself, discovering what it is he wants to say as these mini-essays evolve. Like that Smith-Rohmer thing. Or his deciding that dull perioder The Age of Innocence is "Scorsese's first science-fiction movie." That's a good one.

Often times he seems almost as surprised as us by his findings. Take for instance his musing on the time-twisting narrative of alleged comedy Groundhog Day: "Who'd have thought Ramis and Murray, the stars of Ghostbusters, would prove the rightful heirs of Alain Resnais?" Or concluding that, within the rigid limits of their own particular formulas, Merchant-Ivory-chocolate-boxing and Bruckheimer-Simpson-muscle-dick pics are equally over-blown and full of themselves. Or describing Dick Tracy as "a prosthesis for Warren Beatty's ego". Ouch.

These moments are what keep us aboard. After all, there's little point in binding together a shed-load of old film reviews unless they tell us more than whether or nor X was very good in Y, or whether Uma Thurman was shit in whatever it was. (Clue: she would have been.) No, here the book is very good, even when you find yourself disagreeing. (He's right on Arnie's The Last Action Hero, wrong about Sally Potter's Orlando.) And he writes very well indeed. I particularly liked his description of Michael Nyman's "wheezy staccato pomp," and of new digital effects as "sculpted light."

And, being charitable, we can even forgive a slight ambivalence towards Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy. But in the end zero tolerance is demanded toward calling that same director's Dekalog (surely one of European cinema's crowning glories) as "almost entirely unwatchable". Just where is that Jack Straw when you need him?