The arches of the Duke Of York’s Picturehouse have gazed out over Preston Circus for nearly a century now. It’s survived the potentially fatal invention of the television set, the home video revolution and, most recently, the strain of internet piracy.

We’re told this latest threat has Hollywood studio execs waking up shrieking in cold sweats, but the BBC’s much-admired, bequiffed critic is characteristically relaxed.

“People have always talked about the death of cinema, but I think what will actually happen is that people will simply choose to consume films in different ways. It will be independent cinemas, proper cinemas that will thrive, where people will get a real theatrical experience. And those who want to will be able to watch films on their tiny screens on mobile phones and that will be fine.”

One thing is certain – there is no place for plastic spectacles in his vision of film’s future.

“I know I sound like an old fuddy duddy, but I don’t think 3D is the future of cinema, I just don’t. I’ve never seen any film in 2D and thought: ‘I’m not feeling involved because it’s not in three-dimensions’.”

Kermode will be at our very own “proper cinema” on Monday, part of a tour that will see him visit dozens of picture houses in support of his new book It’s Only A Movie. It’s a great read. Part memoir, part meditation on the relationship between memory and cinema (more on this later), it kicks off with the joyous birth of his own inner film nerd in the theatres of East London.

“People have no trouble believing that character is built on the sports field, but not enough is written about how someone’s character is built in the cinema,” he says.

“A big part of visiting places like the Duke Of York’s is because I’m sure the reason I became as enthusiastic about cinema was because of that whole experience of going to the Phoenix in Finchley as a kid. If I had it my way, I’d spend a year going around all the old picture houses in the country.”

From his time on scholarly film mag Sight And Sound, through to the Observer, BBC2’s Culture Show and his radio work, Kermode has become the country’s most recognisable film critic not least because of the haircut, unchanged since his youth. He’s the most popular contender for Jonathan Ross’s chair on Film 2010 (as we went to press, the BBC couldn’t confirm who would get it, but a Facebook campaign had ground into motion to ensure it was Kermode). His book is rammed with anecdotes from a career spent interviewing some of his heroes (and some of the villains), including a bizarre encounter with Werner Herzog that saw the German director shot in the leg as Kermode interviewed him in the Hollywood hills. He’s been evicted from the Cannes film festival and undergone a handbagging from Dame Helen Mirren.

“Part of me thought I had to write these stories down, if only so I stop boring my friends with them. But I also really wanted to make it read like I speak...I think I’m best known as a radio journalist, and when I started to get the voice right I could just ramble on. So now it’s all in a book I can just wave it at somebody rather than telling these stories again.”

Much of It’s Only A Movie was written up on a laptop from the floor of packed trains between Southampton to Waterloo (Kermode lives in the New Forest). But as he began to get his memories down, he found himself questioning his interpretation of events, and a key theme of the book emerged.

“There are people who’ve been in the same room I have at the same time, where the same thing has happened, but we have completely different memories of what took place. I’ll give you an example: I wrote some stuff about Jason Isaacs [an early part of the book outlines a young Kermode’s intense hero worship of schoolmate Isaacs, who grew up to be the actor best known as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films].

I was talking to him a couple of days ago and he just said: ‘That’s completely not me – I wasn’t cool, I was awkward and strange!’.

“If you take the footage a director shot on set and give it three different editors, you’ll get three different movies. The camera shot the same thing, the same actual events happened, but the reaction shots, the cutaways, the lines left out, the music... these are all different. The point I’m making is that everything you remember has been edited by you, it has been put together into a narrative by you, and when you sit down to watch it, you tinker with it like a director.”

If a single moment can have a thousand different permutations, then our opinions about the films we see are equally diverse; Kermode remembers with almost supernatural clarity seeing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil with a friend at screen two of the Odeon in Oxford Road, Manchester, and being astonished his pal hadn’t fallen in love with the film as he had (“It was like we’d been in different cinemas”), and Kermode himself is thought a prince of fools by many sci-fi fans because of his dismissal of the Star Wars movies.

“I have a blog where people write very enthusiastically about why I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he laughs.

“But I actively encourage it, because in the end, that debate is what promotes film culture and gets people engaging with film and talking about it.”

He himself has had to be flexible about his opinions down the years after an early, humbling experience with David Lynch’s surreal 1986 thriller Blue Velvet.

“I really took against it, and thought it was such a reprehensible film I stormed out of the cinema. Some time later I had an altercation in a bar with a guy who said, ‘You’re the one who wrote that review of Blue Velvet’.

I thought he was going to shake my hand and buy me a pint, but he actually either pushed me or punched me – depending on how weedy I’m feeling at the time – and was just very cross on a deeply personal level. But I couldn’t get the film out of my head and so I went back watched it a couple of years later and it was like: ‘Oh wow... I get it’.”

It’s probably fair to say he wouldn’t welcome any more commentary in the form of physical violence, but he has had another change of heart forced upon him in recent years. For some time, he’d talked passionately of his aversion to the small screen, calling television an “inherently inferior” medium in the face of cinematic TV epics such as The Wire and Mad Men. His views prompted the Observer newspaper to set him a challenge.

“We’d had a particularly bad summer of terrible movie blockusters and they sent me a bunch of TV box sets and told me to spend two weeks watching them. I had to admit that, yes, I was completely out of step. I loved Doctor Who and Life On Mars and I’ve seen a couple of episodes of Mad Men, and I understand now that it’s farcical to claim cinema as a whole is superior to television nowadays.

A big part of it is only that I don’t have the time to sit down and watch TV because of my work.”

It is perhaps just as well Kermode has changed his perspective on the smaller screen ... if his Facebook fans get their way he could soon find himself a more frequent visitor.

* Mark Kermode will be at the Duke Of York’s Picturehouse on Monday. Call 0871 7042056.

* Visit www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Duke_Of_Yorks to find out more about what the picturehouse is doing in its centenary year.