“We were cowed into thinking that only European cinema mattered,” Mr. Scorsese, who once shared a closet-size office in Times Square with Mr. Sarris, said in a 2009 interview. “What Andrew showed us is that art was all around us, and that our tradition, too, had much to offer; he was our guide to the world of cinema.”

Mr. Sarris’s book “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968” stands as his magnum opus. If Ms. Kael more often won points as the high stylist, Mr. Sarris was cerebral and analytic, interested always in the totality of a film’s effect on its audience and in the sweep of a director’s career. He opened his essay on Fritz Lang, the Austrian-born director, this way:

“Fritz Lang’s cinema is the cinema of the nightmare, the fable and the philosophical dissertation. Mr. Lang’s apparent weaknesses are the consequences of his virtues. He has always lacked the arid sophistication lesser directors display to such advantage.”

Andrew Sarris was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 31, 1928, to Greek immigrant parents, George and Themis Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. His romance with movies was near to imprinted on his DNA. He remembered sitting in a darkened theater at the age of 3 or 4 entranced by a movie based on a Jules Verne story. “The liquidity of the scene and the film,” he recalled, “was truly magical, especially to someone not many years out of the womb himself.”

He attended John Adams High School in Queens, his time there overlapping for a year or two with the newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin’s. But his concerns lay elsewhere. He recalled, as a teenager, sitting in his Queens aerie, listening to the Academy Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle award ceremonies, and developing his ideas, idiosyncratic and polemical, on film.

He graduated from Columbia College in 1951 and served three years in the Army Signal Corps. He returned to live with his mother — his father had died — in Queens, passing his post-college years in “flight from the laborious realities of careerism,” as he put it.