By Max Goldberg

DAVID THOMSON JOURNEYS across the bay this month bearing gifts for the movie lover: Shanghai Express, My Man Godfrey, Greed – the list goes on. Reflecting the considerable sway that goes along with being an acclaimed critic for better than 30 years (Thomson's calling card, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, was first published in 1975), the Pacific Film Archive asked the San Francisco film scribe to helm a 19-film potpourri of American cinema.

Lest you expect to gorge guilt free on the treasures of Hollywood's past, though, the series is infused with the same fatalism that dominates Thomson's new book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, as well as his most recent edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Put simply, the critic has been on rocky terms with the movies as of late; a once fiery love affair has grown shaky and suspicious. For one thing, Thomson is pretty well convinced that cinema's prime is past. More unsettling, though, is his sense that the movies, even at their best, are a deeply flawed medium.

Granted, there's an undeniable need for unsentimental studies of Hollywood's output, but Thomson has grown increasingly hell-bent on wrestling with an abstraction of "the movies" – a task worthy of Ahab – rather than simply reckoning with what's on the screen. His series at the PFA is designed to follow the trajectory prescribed in his latest writings: how the movies have fallen from a grace that was never quite the equal to that of a good book.

However, while most of the features playing at the Noir City: San Francisco Film Noir Festival (which kicks off this week at the Balboa Theater) don't have much in the way of literary depth, the thrust of Noir City is to get us deeper into the movies: to become so submerged that we develop our understanding of what the medium can do rather than lament what it can't. Eddie Muller and Anita Monga's Noir City programming mines for unexpected riches, while Thomson's seals Hollywood's past, implicitly dismissing the need for alternative, in-depth film histories.

Questioning the limits of cinematic form is valid enough, but Thomson can do it to the point of being reductive. With distributors, multiplexes, DVD manufacturers, and Blockbuster stores already limiting what most people can see, do we really need one of the nation's preeminent film thinkers playing the same game? Shouldn't our most gifted film critics exhort us to see films from a wide swath of eras, styles, and countries of origin, rather than break the bad news that the movies just aren't what they used be? Thomson's degenerative view of the medium is made maddening by his obstinate refusal to incorporate much of anything in the way of avant-garde filmmaking, or important directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien, in his dictionary update. When he does bother to comment on someone like Abbas Kiarostami, the critic doesn't penetrate the surface nearly so deep as he does in entries on classical figures like Howard Hawks. The halcyon days of the studio era are – deep breath – past, but does this contextual shift make The Royal Tenenbaums negligible (see his dictionary's entry on Wes Anderson) while His Girl Friday remains essential?

Thomson acknowledges many of the films in his PFA program as masterpieces, but one wonders whether he's as interested in taking them on their own terms as much as incorporating them into his gloomy "equation" of American cinema. Of course, as an ardent admirer of Hollywood's golden age, I put myself in an uncomfortable position taking shots at the man bringing the likes of Sunrise and Sullivan's Travels back to the big screen. This is, after all, the second time in a matter of weeks that Thomson is presenting Hawks's classic Only Angels Have Wings (he introduced the film at the Bridge Theatre's 65th-birthday celebration), and such persistence is something to celebrate.

It's refreshing to have a frankly opinionated critic capable of such snapping prose in the post-Pauline Kael era. However, while Thomson has played the provocateur before, his recent writing can be more stifling than stimulating. For him, the movies are no longer about life, and, hence, their artistry is tainted. Of the final film in his program, Thomson writes, "Heat is a sign of a dreadful disease in films today – the way movies are about themselves and not life." It's an idea so loaded with Thomson's own history with the movies – fascination, exuberance, disappointment, regret – that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any sort of objective truth about the medium. And yet it's all passed off, ever so informally, with the aura of fact – enter the stifling nature of Thomson's criticism.

To be fair, Thomson's PFA series is a thoughtfully constructed retrospective of Hollywood cinema, allowing popular favorites (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Shop around the Corner), art films (The Crowd, Magnolia), and rarely screened gems (Daisy Kenyon, the uncut version of Heaven's Gate) to recapture the glory of the big screen. The cineastes will be satiated and allowed to come to their own conclusions regarding any one of the films.

Still, we might remain aware of the framing of the whole: how, taken together, these movies might work to emphasize Thomson's particular perspective on American cinema. Or at least, as Thomson suggests in his PFA program notes, "it's something to talk about over a cup of coffee."

'David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood' screens Jan. 13-30, Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.