In excruciating conversations over drinks around the city, during the fourteen months that Renata Adler served as film critic for The New York Times, I often found myself serving, by a whoosh of role suction, as her apologist. When anyone else present seemed prepared to champion her critical honor, I'd find myself laying back. Even after a heavy artillery barrage, my reinforcements were timid and lackluster….

Now Random House has published all her Times stuff (January, 1968–February, 1969) virtually unreedited, in the precise order of its appearance—nearly two hundred complete pieces of writing: daily reviews, Sunday essays, movie-oriented reports from Renata Adler 1938– © 1984 Thomas VictorNew York, Paris, Rome, Venice, Rochester and Havana—under the title A Year in the Dark.

Reading through her year in a couple of sittings, I became progressively more ashamed of (and bewildered by) my old soft shoe, since it could scarcely be more...