" People love movies. People love lists, " says outgoing Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr in his cheerful introduction to The A List, and though he’s no doubt right, not everyone is going to love this one. It’s not just a matter of the omissions and the odd inclusions, which are inevitable, especially since you could compile a list of a thousand essential films and still not satisfy everyone (if anyone). The problem, rather, is that if you’ve seen most of the movies the National Society of Film Critics has chosen, you’re likely to have read about them several times over, and if you’ve seen only 10 or 20, you’re probably not movie-obsessed enough to want to go much deeper. Perhaps the ideal reader for this book is an incipient movie buff who wants a relatively uneccentric guide to current critical thinking. If such a person exists.

Some essential facts about The A List. The films are listed alphabetically. Each film is accompanied by a short essay, about three or four pages long, most of them reprinted from another source. Forty-one critics contributed (including the Phoenix’s Peter Keough and Gerald Peary), so there’s some doubling and even tripling up. The oldest movies here are Les vampires and The Birth of a Nation, both from 1915; the most recent is ’97’s L.A. Confidential. Carr points out that the selection process was contentious but not arbitrary and that the results reflect an effort to be inclusive regarding genres and countries, and to choose the most striking or representative or influential film from each member of the auteur pantheon, as well as extraordinary films from lesser lights (e.g., Casablanca, the template of happy accidents).

Given that most critics aren’t particularly interesting as writers, the readability factor here is pretty high. Contemplating remarkable films is naturally more stimulating than assessing the generally dull hum of current product, and almost everyone here writes as if he or she had been given a swell opportunity. Sure, there’s the occasional flat, synopsis-heavy essay or eruption of critical gas. But there are also many nicely turned bits, like Roger Ebert’s remembering what La dolce vita has meant to him at various stages in his life and Andrew Sarris’s putting aside his epigrammatic approach for a touch of poetry when confronting Blow-Up ( " The wind is blowing. The body is gone. The leaves flutter with chilling indifference. " ).

The films fall into three categories: the warhorses (Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain), the one-time aficionado favorites that have achieved general respect (The Searchers, Vertigo), and the new kids on the block who may or may not make it into a similar book published 20 years hence (Happy Together, Close-up). To the extent that the book reflects the canon as of 2002, it seems that there’s been some retrenchment after the critical wars of the past 40 some years. Few would bother to debate the auteur theory anymore, and directors who were once considered mere entertainers are now honored cinematic artists. But the idea that goes hand-in-hand with this notion — that film has certain intrinsic values that are unique to the medium and that transcend genre or good intentions — is taken only so far. There’s no Stanley Kramer here (unless you count High Noon, which he produced), but there’s no Samuel Fuller, either. So even though the old idea of the prestige flick has been pretty much banished, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the lone salute to all the b-movie geniuses who have been uncovered by enlightened devotees and have inched their way toward the sunlight of critical approval. Which is just the kind of nit-picking I was hoping to avoid, but what else can you do with a book like this?

Jay Carr signs copies of The A List and introduces a double bill of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (a/k/a Breathless) and Bande à part at 6 p.m. this Wednesday, May 15, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Call (617) 734-2501.