By his own reckoning, Richard Schickel sits in an interesting place in movie history, between the geezers who still recall falling under D.W. Griffith"s spell and the current crop of cinephiles who dig the wrong parts of the past--Douglas Sirk"s Written on the Wind, say, rather than his delirious All That Heaven Allows. It"s a clever distinction, and its brothers and sisters are everywhere in Matinee Idylls. The author of a small library of books about movies and moviemakers, a producer of television documentaries, and Time"s longtime cinema guy, Schickel"s authority on movie history is evident in these pieces gathered from 1984 to the present. Whether taking on stars (Bette Davis, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier), directors (Frank Capra, Sam Fuller, Satyajit Ray), or trends (the halcyon "50s and "60s when Americans watched foreign films), Schickel shows us what is fractured, forgotten, misunderstood, or just not gotten by audiences about his subjects. Frank Capra, he reminds us, regularly saw, and put into his pictures, the sweetness and the menace of ordinary folk. Greta Garbo"s dwindling stock is regrettable but understandable: her star vehicles were dead things that mostly reflected her ego. Sam Fuller? He was a "movie bozo" who could still charge his screen with "the shock of the transgressive." Writing in a cool rather than a hot style, Schickel"s draw is cumulative. At last, he seems the best kind of critic, armed with a fan"s love, infinite knowledge, and a calm, unwavering eye. --Lyall Bush