Richard Schickel, who was so captivated by Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” when he was 5 years old that he grew up to be a noted film critic, Hollywood historian and prolific author and documentarian — and estimated that he had watched 22,590 movies — died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 84.

His daughter Erika Schickel said the cause was complications of dementia.

Fortified by boxes of Good & Plenty licorice rather than popcorn, Mr. Schickel reviewed films for Life magazine from 1965 until it closed in 1972, then wrote for Time until 2010 and later for the blog Truthdig.com.

In a career that spanned the star-studded studio era and the rise of independent directors, he also wrote 37 books on movies and filmmakers and wrote or directed more than 30 documentaries, mostly for television. He shared or received three Emmy nominations, for “Life Goes to the Movies” in 1976 and “Minnelli on Minnelli: Liza Remembers Vincente” in 1987.

Richard Zoglin, a fellow critic and now a contributing editor at Time, said that what distinguished Mr. Schickel among his peers was his comprehensive knowledge of the movie industry’s players and processes coupled with “an astute critical sensibility” that resisted the trendy.