Keepers: The Greatest Films— and Personal Favorites— of a Moviegoing Lifetime

Film critic Schickel saw his first film in 1938 (Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves) and started reviewing movies professionally in 1965. Since then, he estimates, he’s seen 22,590 films. In this entertaining and informative journey through cinema history, the renowned Time critic—and author of 37 Hollywood biographies and histories—presents readers with a primer on film history and shares his unique insights on movies big and small. Schickel is clear from the start that he’s a fan of popular (rather than “art”) cinema and considers himself more of an expert on American film than international, despite later, perfectly cogent sections devoted to foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard. Moving roughly in chronological order, Schickel begins by paying his respects to the silent films of D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford and the 1930s screwball comedies of Howard Hawks—he readily admits that his “loyalty, historically and emotionally speaking, is to the first two decades or so of the talkies.” Then he moves on through Bonnie and Clyde and Star Wars. His taste is eclectic (Errol Flynn is his favorite movie star, Orson Welles is a disappointment) but his opinions are always fully backed up with examples. Schickel, who posits in his introduction that movies are about both nothing and everything, wholly succeeds in making readers care about every film he’s seen. (June)