The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman is “one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking critics in the United States,” Martin Scorsese once wrote, hastening to add that his praise for Mr. Hoberman is regardless of the fact that “he doesn’t always like my films.” Beginning Monday, Mr. Hoberman will be the subject of BAMcinématek’s “30 Years of J. Hoberman,” a career-spanning retrospective of films Mr. Hoberman has championed through three decades of writing for the Voice.

A film calendar that contains Allan Arkush’s 1979 punk-sploitation confection “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” structuralist cinema pioneer Ernie Gehr’s 1991 experimental short “Side/Walk/ Shuttle,” John Carpenter’s original urban Western “Assault on Precinct 13,” Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2003 Ozu valentine “Café Lumiere,” and Mr. Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” may seem coyly eclectic in 2008. But BAM’s compendium is not the work of a programming Johnny-come-lately. The baker’s dozen of features illustrates Mr. Hoberman’s dogged and unwavering enthusiasm for motion pictures as much as his curatorial erudition.

From his first review for the Voice, an assessment of David Lynch’s feature debut “Eraserhead,” in which he declared that he “would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of ‘Star Wars,'” Mr. Hoberman has had as much in common with the great popular music critics of the 1970s as with his fellow movie critics. Like Lester Bangs, who examined old, new, mainstream, and vanguard work with equal suspicion, passion, and curiosity, Mr. Hoberman created his own aesthetic beat, putting experimental short works, foreign art films, and mainstream Hollywood fare all under the same energetic scrutiny. Infuriating though it often could be, a Hoberman review invariably articulated a fierce intelligence and a strong desire to position films within both the mechanisms of expression their makers employed and the social and political contexts from which the work emerged.

Reading Hoberman in the 1980s was a weekly reminder that thinking about and parsing out the way movies worked (or didn’t work) was a hell of a lot more fun than just passively watching them. Few critics possessed Mr. Hoberman’s facility for detailing the way a film felt during the fleeting minutes that it actually unspooled and again during the lifetime in which it could reverberate afterward. His review of the director’s cut of Sergio Leone’s final film, the sprawling, sentimental “Once Upon a Time in America,” memorably focused on a bizarre sequence involving an endlessly ringing phone, as if Leone’s film was an experimental provocation rather than a multigenerational crime epic.

To this day, Mr. Hoberman’s reviews are, in fact, so singularly and meticulously clear in depicting what their author takes away from any given screening that it sometimes seems as if he has seen a completely different movie than the one released in theaters. I’d still love to experience Richard Tuggle’s 1984 Clint Eastwood vehicle “Tightrope” the way the Voice’s critic saw it. In print, Mr. Hoberman made “Tightrope” sound like its star’s sinister, sexy, and transgressive magnum opus. On-screen, however, the film appeared to be an off-the-rack, risibly turgid serial murderer drama. Next month, Anthology Film Archives will screen a quartet of short film works created by Mr. Hoberman himself. Shot in Binghamton, N.Y., in 1971, “Customs and Immigration” combines footage from a ’30s “Flash Gordon” serial, pixilated parking lots, loose junkie theatricals, snippets from Louis and Bebe Barron’s revolutionary electronic music score to “Forbidden Planet,” and doo-wop group the Dubs’s “In the Chapel of Dreams.” “I hated America until I discovered TV,” says an unidentified man, describing his childhood reaction to immigrating here. Playful, obtuse, and visually striking, “Customs and Immigration” depicts a half dozen risky and seductive ways for new Americans to go native.

Using printed titles and repetition, “Broken Honeymoon no. 3” reshuffles the conceptual deck of a Dick York-era black-and-white episode of the ’60s sitcom “Bewitched.” Mr. Hoberman’s deconstruction of a typically contrived and tyrannically formulaic “Bewitched” conceit involving a mother-in-law, home movies, miscast spells, and thrown voices proves spasmodically hypnotic and embarrassingly overpowering. “Cargo of Lure” is a 15-minute silent trip up the Harlem River circa 1974. “Is the film the reflection of reality or the reality of reflection?” Mr. Hoberman asks in Anthology’s program notes. Rhetorical or not, it’s a question that, like the rest of J. Hoberman’s critical provocations, draws the reader deeper into movies.

“30 Years of J. Hoberman” runs through April 3 at BAMcinématek (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).