A cinematic classic

What kind of film reference book has no entry for Michael Winner, but has one for Rin Tin Tin? A: A very good one indeed. It's a reference book with opinions, even when it isn't expressing one.

Since its first edition in 1975, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (as it was called) has become indispensable. But imagine how different it looked back then. Let's say you looked up Kim Novak, wanting to know her date of birth or real name. You'd find these where they belonged, at the top of the entry.

But read on. It begins: "Novak was a big, shy blonde, diffident about her beautiful body and forever trying to speak up and project." That is not by-the-book biography. But it makes you stop and think: of course, that's the thing about her. That's why she acts like she does. In a few words, Thomson sums up not only her essence, but her effect on you. He also accurately lists every film she was in, pausing at Vertigo to note that "Novak's contribution to that film is one of the major female performances in the cinema."

And so on. You find your own responses enriched. It is, not just figuratively speaking, an eye-opener. This is now the fourth edition - let's call it Biographical Dictionary IV - and so much has happened since the last one. Enough for it to become half as long again, for a start; and what's so marvellous about this work is that everything that was in BD I is in BD IV.

It's not like when Chambers Biographical decides to cut the entry on some Dead White European Male in order to make room for the latest Pop Idol. For Thomson, just because it's in the past doesn't mean it's forgotten.

No one gets kicked out; and, since the 1994 edition, 300 new entries have come in. Thomson alone knows how many have been updated. Rin Tin Tin is new, and that isn't a wilfully eccentric inclusion; the Alsatian saved Warners the way Mae West saved Paramount, and learned his lines quicker than most bipeds.

It is brave to put your opinions into a book like this, particularly when we all have our own, tenderly held, about our favourite or least favourite films. And when you know as much about the medium as Thomson does, itis easy to be snobbish; he never is. He might be tougher on the Coen brothers than you might like ("numb satire," he says of Barton Fink, although he liked Fargo "nearly as much as its many fans") but he's on your side, really, when he concludes the entry on Kieslowski by saying his films "seem to think they're perfect - and I want to scream". Hurrah. BD IV, like its prequels, mainly has actors and directors, longer entries for the latter. But he's now slipped in a few writers, too - Pinter and Greene, as well as Pauline Kael, who only wrote on films, but still deserves an entry in such a work. I remember noticing that Malcolm McDowell wasn't in BD III. Now he is, even though his career "has led in so many forlorn directions"; but as his face on the Clockwork Orange poster is "one of the classic images of film history", in he goes.

I defy anyone to find a gap which needs filling, or an opinion which is mad, injudicious, or not beautifully written. You will hop delightedly from one entry to another until you're physically exhausted. This is one of the great reference books of all time, never mind about film; and it just got even better.