Comedian Patton Oswalt’s new book, “Silver Screen Fiend,” is a sort of double feature.

The book’s first attraction is all the movies it mentions, around 700 of them, many listed in a sprawling appendix that serves as a diary of Mr. Oswalt’s four-year binge watching movies in theaters in the late 1990s. Catalogs of cult films and classics can be like scripture for hard-core fans, guidance toward cinematic gems still out there to be discovered. Mr. Oswalt used five vintage movie-reference books to guide his bender during those...