David Thomson

From one of the most admired critics of our time, brilliant insights into the act of watching movies and an enlightening discussion about how to derive more from any film experience. Since first publishing his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film in 1975 (now in its sixth edition), David Thomson has been one of the most trusted authorities on all things...

The third novel in David Thomson's series inspired by movie genres - an enchanting yet haunting celebration of screwball romantic comedies. In 1985, with the acclaimed Suspects, and then in 1990 with the exhilarating Silver Light, David Thomson delivered unprecedented fictions in which the characters were figures from film noir and the Western. Now a trilogy is completed with Connecticut....

Noah Cross, Norma Desmond, Norman Bates, Harry Lime – these are a few of nearly a hundred names that inhabit the mind of the narrator as he starts to compose short biographies of some of the most famous characters in the history of film noir. He sketches in whole lives, lives as intense as the dreams put up on the...

A leading film critic on the evolving world of streaming media and its impact on society The city at night under lockdown, a time of plague and anxiety. It is an exciting new age of television, the light that flutters in every cell in the city. But no one seems to be asking: What is the endless stream doing to...

From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West, its rich, colourful characters, and its many faces—historical, mythic, and cinematic—are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books. Two characters dominate the novel's foreground: a Georgia O'Keeffe-like figure, photographer Susan Garth, shrewd, cantankerous, reclusive, and still self-reliant at...

A renowned movie critic on film’s treatment of one of mankind’s darkest behaviours: murder "[Thomson's] analysis of death in Hitchcock movies is gorgeous. His restlessness is palpable. There is an anxiety in this brief, hurried book that suits these political and medical times."—Lisa Schwarzbaum, New York Times Book Review Included in the New York Times Book Review's "Best Books to...

A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world As anyone in the news business knows, audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumours of our own demise. In this darkly comic book, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic...

The Big Sleep: Marlowe and Vivian practising kissing; General Sternwood shivering in a hothouse full of orchids; a screenplay, co-written by Faulkner, famously mysterious and difficult to solve. Released in 1946, Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler reunited Bogart and Bacall and gave them two of their most famous roles. The mercurial but ever-manipulative Hawks dredged humour and happiness out...

Since 2012, hundreds of men and women have left Western countries to join jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Many are still there, many have been killed, but some have chosen to return to their countries of origin. French Journalist David Thomson met some of those who came back. Bilel, Yassin, Zoubeir, and Lena each has a different profile and story....

In little more than a century of cinema—Birth of a Nation was one hundred years old in 2015—our sense of what a film director is, or should be, has shifted in fascinating ways. A director was once a functionary; then an important but not decisive part of an industrial process; then accepted as the person who was and should be...

Why Acting Matters by David Thomson is a provocative, highly engaging essay on the art of pretending on the stage, on screen, and in daily life. Does acting matter? David Thomson, one of our most respected and insightful writers on movies and theatre, answers this question with intelligence and wit. In this fresh and thought-provoking essay, Thomson tackles this most...

From cinema's most distinguished historian and critic comes a masterful assessment of the whole sweep of movie history. The movies traded on the liberation of secret desires—drive that car as fast as you can; turn your humble abode into a palace; conquer all the mean spirits in the world; be as free and winsome as the Tramp yet as rich...

“A marvellous bombshell of a book, by one of our most formidably knowledgeable and insightful writers on film, it is filled with surprises and witty asides. Though Thomson is quick to pounce on the hypocrisies and historical omissions of some of these war movies, there is nothing compromised about his own daredevil judgments. We are in the hands of a...