[1][7][8][9] His first book A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman was first published in 1980 by Oxford University Press, and is in its fourth revised edition.
"[13] In A Cinema of Loneliness, Kolker also wrote about buddy films as an extension of male bonding, in which men in these movies could engage in nonsexual activity together while marginalizing women.
"[15] Kolker also pointed out that the aural and visual simultaneity in Altman's films was critical as that represented an emphasis on the plurality of events, which required viewers to become active spectators.
"[6] Kolker's second book The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema, published in 1983 also by Oxford University Press, concentrated on image, form, and politics in film since World War II, particularly in Europe and Latin America.
[8][17][18] In addition to Kubrick, Kolker's analysis of film auteurs includes books on Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Wim Wenders.
[20][21] The book also observed that Bertolucci's representation of women was problematic, due to the way he "often places them in inferior or, worse, destructive roles.
"[22] Kolker's books and articles of the 1980s, while heavily focused on male auteurs, analyzed cinema using feminist film theory (such as that of Laura Mulvey).
[28][29] In 2006, Kolker edited an Oxford University Press book on Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey to reexamine its complexities.
[32] In the book's introduction, Kolker wrote, "Traditional film studies starts with the individual work, genre, or director, and moves outward to larger issues of the ideologies of production and reception, to gender issues, to the effects of distribution on viewership, and increasingly to the ways globalization is affecting national cinemas, always attempting to solidify its ground in theory.