THE veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier once warned against the journalistic practice of listing 'best films'.

"Too many beautiful and important films are missing, and they leave out the texture, the richness and life of cinema by not including all those 'imperfect' films that are more meaningful and alive than frozen, dated 'classics', " he said.

It's a concern anyone attempting - as I am - to name the films that have mattered most, during a lifetime of reviewing films, should constantly keep in mind. More often than not a film that lingers in the memory might not commonly be regarded as great whereas some films routinely included in so-called definitive lists of all-time classics are utterly forgettable except for what they may represent commercially or in terms of history.

A film lives in the immediacy of its flickering presence on a screen. It is an emotional and sensual experience best shared in a darkened cinema rather than in the cold light of academic analysis. My idea in compiling - at the suggestion of the Sunday Tribune - a list of 200 films that have changed my life has been to draw exclusively on movies reviewed in the course of my 40 years as a critic, and to be guided in making the selection by my initial reaction to each film. It is a list conceived primarily as a celebration of all those loves at first sight, those blind dates that took me by surprise and in unexpected ways opened my eyes and feelings to worlds and experiences other than my own.

Some pushed the possibilities of cinema to disturbing extremes, others found an overlooked beauty or truth in the familiar, whether through humour or sadness.

To recapture that exhilaration - while avoiding the sin of being wise after the event - I have gone back as far as possible to my own contemporaneous lists of the best films of each year, starting in 1966 when I became critic for the Sunday Independent, and at the Sunday Tribune from 1985 onwards.

Before that I'd written my first reviews as a subeditor on the Northern Despatch in Darlington, causing something of a controversy when I named Hitchcock's Psycho as film of the year in 1960. For the years 1973, 1986, 1987, 1991 and 1993, when I didn't make lists, I've fallen back on my reviews and notes to single out films for which at that time I felt particular enthusiasm.

I can't be sure about the first movie I ever saw. It could have been Bambi, because I can remember noticing my mother's tears. Maybe it was a war film, the title of which I can't recall, but the image of a man and a woman running to the exit from a German mountain bunker, trying to escape before a bomb they planted went off, still haunts me.

I remember running errands for a woman next door to earn enough to watch Saturday afternoon cowboy serials at the Ritz in Ballsbridge, or the 'Shack' as it was called. A cousin of my father who had been a war chaplain brought me into town to see Wake Island at the Grand Central cinema on O'Connell Street, a shock confrontation with the horrific immediacy of the war I'd followed on the radio, trapped there in the trenches with a small group of Americans as they held out to the last man against the invading Japanese.

With my aunt May, who had been a singer, I shared the more sensual pleasure of Moira Shearer in the sumptuous backstage ballet story The Red Shoes and its sequel Tales of Hoffman, my first awareness - as I later learned - of the visual genius of the writer/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Even as a teenager, with only sixpence a week for pocket money, I was dependent on others to take me to the cinema.

My father introduced me to Carol Reed with The Fallen Idol, Graham Greene's moving story of a lonely boy who in trying to defend a butler innocently betrays him, and then the thriller The Third Man, with its haunting shot of Orson Welles momentarily caught in the light in a Viennese doorway.

His infatuation with Grace Kelly meant that I got to see High Noon - and the ticking clock building up suspense before Gary Cooper walked out alone to face the returning gunmen - and later The Country Girl and Rear Window, after which I never missed a Hitchcock film.

Although I'd never heard of the auteur theory, I began to recognise films by their directors. A low-budget second feature, Killer's Kiss, was so different to the usual Hollywood gangster fare that I watched out for its director Stanley Kubrick's second film, The Killing.

A friend of my sister led me to the Astor Cinema on Eden Quay and the daring eroticism of Silvana Mangano's muddrenched body in Bitter Rice. The clock without hands in Wild Strawberries opened a door to the dark brooding world of Ingmar Bergman. In London I wooed my eventual wife, Julia Alonso Beazcochea, with Visconti's Rocco And His Brothers and Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

All of this early experience of films was purely intuitive. I never thought of writing about film but was instead inspired to write plays and stories, one of which was published in the Evening Herald while I was still at school.

I lived more and more in imagined other worlds triggered not just by films but by books and music and paintings, worlds beyond the quiet neighbourhood of middle-class suburban Dublin - dangerous and exciting worlds full of challenge and adventure.

After college I eventually took a boat to Liverpool to find what was out there. By chance I got the job of writing about films on the Northern Despatch; nobody else cared about cinema - they were all too settled in their married lives. Through reviewing films I began to understand what I thought about them. I suppose by now I've seen around 14,000 films, but I still feel a thrill of expectation when the lights dim in a cinema.

There's a part of me even that watches the screen in same state of innocence of those first films of childhood.

Television, and then the internet, combined with saturation marketing and multiple-screen opening weekends have now made it almost impossible to see a film without being preconditioned about what you are going to see but, like a jury faced with inadmissible evidence, I try not to be influenced.

We have all lost our screen virginity. The act of seeing a movie is so pre-hyped that the actual movie often seems like something you've already seen.

Life itself has become a film - or a reality show - in which we act out versions of what society, through all-pervasive advertising and political spin, expects us to be. There's hardly an experience or an event that isn't anticipated in advance. Christmas is in the shops before Halloween and by December the January sales are already being promoted. Even Christmas Day Mass is celebrated the day before.

Opinion polls tell us who's going to govern us before we get a chance to vote so the actual election hardly seems necessary.

Education is no longer about learning but about anticipating - with the help of expensive grinds - what's going to be on exam papers. Children are pressured into dressing and behaving like adults almost before they've had a chance to be children.

Little Miss Sunshine, one of the best films of 2006, daringly satirised the way small girls are prematurely sexualised and encouraged to ape the behaviour of beauty queens, a sign that Hollywood, perhaps in reaction to the heavy-handed attempts at censorship introduced by neocon Republican-controlled congressional committees, may be rediscovering the subversive edge that helped cinema come of age so spectacularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

Paul Schrader, who turned from writing about films to making them - his screenplay for Taxi Driver led to his directorial debut with Hardcore - once said that film critics belong on the barricades. It certainly felt that way in Ireland, where paternalistic Catholic Churchdriven censorship tried, like a latter-day Canute, to hold back the tide of change.

Hundreds of films were either cut or banned, creating a backlog at the Appeal Board that meant, for instance, that Bu�?uel's masterpiece Belle de Jour didn't reach Ireland until 1976, 10 years after its initial release. Mike Nichols's The Graduate, François Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Luchino Visconti's The Damned, Alan Pakula's Klute and even Woody Allen's Bananas were all deemed to "subvert public morality". When Ingmar Bergman's Persona finally arrived at the International Film Theatre via the Appeal Board with an over-18 certificate, I found that it been shorn of several minutes.

This prompted me - with the help of a Deep Throat source within the distribution system - to start leaking monthly blacklists of films banned or cut which, despite efforts by the Department of Justice to censor me on the grounds that the information was confidential and a state secret, eventually forced a reform of the system, but not before the garda�? had threatened prosecution over a screening of Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys.

The new wave in France, led by Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol, and its ripple effect in Italy, Germany, Sweden and even Spain, coincided with a crisis of confidence in Hollywood that forced the major studios, for a brief while, to give free rein to generation of young film-makers eager to take control and push the boundaries of the permissible. Not even censorship could stifle the sense of surprise lying in wait in the dark each week.

Buried as a second feature at the Carlton in 1968 and heavily cut, the brilliance of A Slender Thread was still evident, a tourde-force by debutant director Sydney Pollack that consisted almost entirely of a telephone conversation between Samaritan Sidney Poitier and would-be suicide Anne Bancroft. Another unknown, Francis Ford Coppola, grabbed my eye the same year with You're A Big Boy Now, a comic rites-of-passage story about the dilemma of a boy not knowing what to say to a girl ("Every time I see a girl I feel guilty").

Another second feature that caught my imagination was Head, a film by first-time director Bob Rafelson that, under the guise of a pop movie about the Monkees, ingeniously explored the music industry's media-fed blurring of reality and illusion.

Targets, a thriller starring Boris Karloff as a horror icon who confronts a sniper at a drivein movie, marked the exciting arrival of Peter Bogdanovich.

When we met in Cannes a few years later - he'd then become widely known with The Last Picture Show and What's Up Doc - he told me how he had to haul the reels of Targets around production offices trying to convince studios that he was a director.

Having admired Hal Ashby's debut film The Landlord, at once a satire on racial intolerance and a sensual love story with a farcical view of the human condition, there was the thrill of seeing his promise confirmed with Harold and Maude and The Last Detail. I remember 1974 as a vintage year for first films, with Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha, John Milius's Dillinger, Steven Spielberg's Duel, Michel Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Howard Zieff 's Slither.

When I started going to Cannes in 1972 to draw attention to films we were prevented from seeing in Ireland, my naivety was such that I turned up without accreditation and without a hotel. Louisette Fargette, who was in charge of the press section, was so intrigued to have an Irish critic that she opened doors and enabled me to meet many of the directors I'd been championing, including Hitchcock, Bergman and Pasolini. Jack Nicholson, who won the best actor award in Cannes in 1974 for The Last Detail - having earlier starred in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens - enthused to me about the creative buzz that was transforming Hollywood.

"It worries me that American cinema is thought about in the popular imagination only in terms of the box-office hits the distributors choose to promote, " he told me. "That's not an accurate reflection of what's happening there. The real American cinema is with directors like Rafelson, Altman, Steven Spielberg, Monte Hellman, Jim Frawley, Martin Scorsese, Terry Mallick, George Lucas, Denis Hopper and Hal Ashby."

There's a similar buzz today with the emergence of innovative independent directors like Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronosky, Marc Foster, Paul Greengrass, Paul Haggis, Bill Condon, Richard Linklater, Sophia Coppola and Spike Jonze, while Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, to mention only a few, are producing ever more challenging work. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth have brought controversial documentary cinema into the mainstream.

Independent production companies, typically Participant, with finance from outside the industry, have brought a sense of daring back to Hollywood.

But Sydney Pollack, who has seen it all before, urges caution.

"Back in the 1970s, on Friday or Saturday nights, college kids would watch foreign movies.

Audiences were composed of all ages, " he says. "Today most audiences are younger and they're watching special-effects movies. Most films made today are geared for a demographic that provides repeat business.

And that's 18- to 25-year-olds."

But caution never got films anywhere. Conglomerates may control the major studios. But there's a realisation that the blitz-release blockbuster frenzy that has dominated Hollywood since Don Johnson and Jerry Bruckheimer introduced 'high concept' cinema - making films to fit a 30-second TV promotional ad - may have become a victim of its own excess. The domination of the Oscars earlier this year by lowerbudget independent films with complex themes, such as Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night And Good Luck and Syriana gives me hope.

"How do I judge a picture?"

John Boorman said to me in 1979.

"I look for the presence of a mind behind what I see." Maybe Hollywood is getting its mind back.