A fellow film critic recently chided me for using the term "movies". When I asked what the problem was, I was informed that the term was "Americanese" and its use was "stomach-churningly unacceptable".

I'd always lazily considered the terms "movie" and "film" as perfect synonyms, seldom employed to make a grand statement about the art form, but more of a knee-jerk technique to avoid repetition. I welcomed that they were interchangeable. Cinema was a global commodity where a "movie" such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) could share traces of DNA with a "film" such as, say, Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975).

Moreover, the best double-bill screenings tend to couple a movie with a film. In this example, though "movie" comes out of the transaction slightly worse off. From a modern vantage point one may be inclined to call Sunset Boulevard a film, but it might sound odd to describe India Song as a movie. Were you to describe India Song as "a great movie", the abiding thought might be that you hadn't, in fact, seen it.

That august repository of semantic evolution known as Urban Dictionary succinctly covers this in its definition of movies.

Bob: I love movies.
Jim: Me too.
Bob: Let's go watch Road Trip.
Jim: Sounds good.

I'll try and expand on personal definitions. "Movies", a compression of "moving pictures", infers an element of commercialism (cf Road Trip). Studios make movies, whereas directors make films. Movie engenders a sense of romance and history, of uplighters, cigar smoke, chorus girls, fanfare and a studio emblem where the end credits should be. The term seems almost antiquated, a little like "pictures", which you only ever hear now at lectures by Kevin Brownlow on the silent era or, as Neil Young – the critic who scolded me – claims, in Sunderland, where it is used both to refer to the medium and the venue (eg: "Maam, way gon doon tha pictures").

The word movies doesn't communicate a sense of process, just a physical outcome. Film, meanwhile, is a reference to celluloid. Films also has an academic hue to it, emphasising a connection more to the world of art than of commerce. At (reputable) universities you have "film studies", never "movie studies". The term film contains a sense of the artisanal traits of the medium, equating it with painting, photography or whittling, and thus deserving of close scrutiny. Again, you have film critics, but rarely movie critics, and always film festivals, never movie festivals.

You'd hazard that certain film-makers themselves might take mild umbrage were you to refer to their latest opus as a mere "movie". And film levitates critics to a platform of a moderate societal import and self-worth.

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Is the term movies in need of salvage? Cahiers du Cinéma critics during the 50s and 60s sought to do just that, albeit indirectly. Their abiding belief was that film-makers who were once thought of as production-line stooges (Hawks, Hitchcock, Ulmer et al) were, in fact, high artists who were producing works that contained indelible blueprints of stylistic tics, thematic concerns and even, with Hitchcock, personal perversions. That notion of upsetting this equilibrium, questioning the values of different types of film and homogenising movie and film to achieve a purer sense of critical objectivism is a positive thing. Some of the best writing on film comes from critics who are willing to search for the film that lies dormant in the heart of a movie.

There are two different ways to consider a work like Sex Tape: there's Sex Tape the movie and Sex Tape the film. The former might be seen as the crass, opportunist comedy made because of a happy alignment of "movie" stars and a title that imposes the storyline with a sense of single-purpose direction. Though the latter might be considered a tougher proposition – and the makers of Sex Tape have done themselves no favours – there's reason to consider Sex Tape a film that, if not one that aspires to art, then one that ejaculates it as an unwanted by-product. Sex Tape could be seen to have value as a "film" because of the way it presents the damage done by unchecked purchasing of white goods and the concept that expensive electronic items have lost any real value. A push, but it's definitely there.

I have co-edited a new book entitled What I Love About Movies that collects responses to the question, "What do you love about movies?" from directors, actors and technicians. In this instance, "movies" is used purely for cadence. What I Love About Films just doesn't have the same ring to it. It's all very confusing, and maybe people use these terms without giving it a second thought. Or maybe it's entirely reactive? But to return to Urban Dictionary: one of its (many) definitions of film is that it's an acronym for "father I'd like to marry" (usage: "That Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights is a total film!"). So who knows what to think any more?

• What I Love About Movies will be published by Faber & Faber on 2 October.