The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us

The Big Screen

In this triumphant work David Thomson, one of film's greatest living experts and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, tells the enthralling story of the movies and how they have shaped us. 
 
Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Times, Guardian, Observer and Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR 
 
Taking us around the globe, through time and across multiple media, Thomson tracks the ways in which we were initially enchanted by this mesmerizing imitation of life and let movies - the stories, the stars, the look - show us how to live. But at the same time he shows us how movies, offering a seductive escape from the everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless citizens trying to pursue happiness by sitting quietly in a dark room. Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this great adventure of a book. A passionate feat of storytelling that is vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens - the age that, more than ever, we are living in.

Probably the best overview of the cinema ever written. It sparkles with insight, is packed with anecdote, and pulses with passion ... a glorious celebration of one of humankind's great inventions

A devilish, dazzling, out-there divination ... Criticism is rarely this passionate and brilliant. You come away wanting to watch it all

David Thomson is a giant in the world of film criticism, and his book is the chest-crusher you might expect: erudite, delightfully tangential and surprisingly polemical

Thomson has composed a grand aesthetic, spiritual, and moral account of cinema history assembled around the movies and artists that have meant the most to him. As Thomson reconstructs film history, movies bring us close to reality and deliver us into ecstatic dreams. A pungently written, brilliant book

The theme of The Big Screen is the weirdness of desire ... Drawing on his vast stock of knowledge, Thomson takes us on a meander through Nouvelle Vague and Italian neorealism; Coppola and Scorsese; MGM musicals and film noir. He always comes back in the end to the kind of fun it is possible to have only at the movies, sitting in the dark, staring at the light ... Line by line, Thomson is still the greatest biographical writer about film of all time ... to read him on his favourite films is to be sent back with renewed yearning to that land of Californian light and loveliness

Fascinating ... a loose-limbed, conversational narrative, moving fitfully through time, dawdling over directors and films that interest ... crackling with ideas and vivid impressionisms ... Thomson's stylish prose, simultaneously erudite and entertaining, captivates as it informs ... Buffs and casual fans alike will enjoy this extra-large serving of popcorn for thought

The greatest living writer on the movies ... The Big Screen is surely his magnum opus

Rigorous and rewarding, and a page rarely passes without insight

Nobody else would match its sweep, its erudition, its discernment or its warmth

David Thomson is, I think, the best writer on film in our time. If Have you Seen? was his most succinct and entertaining book, The Big Screen is a large and vivacious map on the history of 'the screen': beginning with Muybridge and then tracing careers ranging from Korda to Renoir to Hawkes to Mizoguchi, to David Lynch and Tarentino, then swerving over to television shows such as I love Lucy and The Sopranos. He has found and created a marvellous plot for the history of film with insights and revelations on every page, as well as a few mcguffins. He is our most argumentative and trustworthy historian of the screen

A great critic cuts both ways - he nudges you into reconsidering the films you love, as well as the ones you dislike. David Thomson's sensual prose has always amplified the imagination of a great critic. In broad outline, The Big Screen is a history of the movies, a wide-ranging task which usually carries with it a certain amount of connect-the-dots tedium. But Thomson's emphases are typically fresh and often ecstatic, even when he's disparaging a film you love. Nobody does it better

Scott Eyman (author of EMPIRE OF DREAMS and LION OF HOLLYWOOD)

Of the medium's many distinguished critics, none is better informed or more authoritative than David Thomson ... [The Big Screen is] part film history, part thesis, part love letter and lament ... genuine insights abound ... Like any great work of criticism, the book is essentially an education in good taste, and crucially it sends us back to the movies. Thomson's montage of ecstasies and laments re-awakens in us the thrill and wonder of moving images and the need to know what happens next. In that, it is as close to definitive as any book on film can be. Just as we look at the movies, we should listen to him

David Thomson is a metaphysician of the movies ... Thomson's brain is the ultimate repertory theatre, perpetually rerunning our favourites and allowing us to wonder at them all over again. The highest praise I can give him is to say that the images he treasures are just as alive on his pages as they were on the big screen

A love letter to a dying art, [The Big Screen] is also a scathing indictment of its legacy. In over 500 pages of breathtaking criticism, [Thomson] seeks to understand the impact of the screen upon our collective consciousness

A cultural overview of the past, present and future of the movies

This is a wildly seductive love letter to what Thomson concludes is a 'lost love' ... he rapturously recalls a lifetime's enchantment with the big screen

A startling analysis of what happens to us in the darkness as we dream with eyes open

There's one standout in this year's slew of film literature, The Big Screen written by David Thomson, a giant in the world of film criticism. His book is erudite but readable, delightfully tangential, and surprisingly polemical. He provides a fascinating ride through the past century of mostly American cinema and posits a theory that 'the shining light and the huddled masses' of yore will be replaced by digital anomie, as the big screen is replaced by YouTube on an iPhone

[The Big Screen] works both as an engaging primer on film history and as a map for more numinous shifts in the path of popular art ... Thomson offers a nuanced portrait ... the details of his narrative glimmer with offbeat insight

David Thomson has a fair claim to be the greatest living writer on film. His major works include The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its 5th edition, and Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films including Masterpieces, Oddities, Guilty Pleasures and Classics (with Just a Few Disasters). Thomson was born in London, and now lives in San Francisco.

a Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films including masterpieces, oddities and guilty pleasures (with just a few disasters)

'Have You Seen...?'

David Thomson's 'Have You Seen?' - A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films is a quirky, idiosyncratic and hugely entertaining look at a century of cinema. 
 
 This is veteran film writer David Thomson's personal, irreverent, hilarious and utterly original take on the 1,000 films he has most loved - and hated - from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Zabriskie Point, from esteemed classics to forgotten curiosities, guilty pleasures to noir treats, horror gems to kitsch disasters. The result is probably the most enjoyable film book you will ever read (and you'll never think about The Sound of Music in the same way again). 
 
 'Delightful ... it's like having the most film-literate pal you can imagine sitting beside you in a multiplex' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Independent 
 
 'A joy ... he's incapable of writing a boring sentence' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Evening Standard Books of the Year 
 
 'This book sets the bar. There isn't a more intelligent, insightful and provocative guide to individual movies in the world' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'Every reader's simple instinct will be to plunge into the heart of it' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Times 
 
 'A dazzlingly authoritative treat ... crammed with insight and epigram' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Observer 
 
 'Eccentric, brilliant, scholarly, perverse, witty, egocentric and infuriating, sometimes all at once' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Philip French 
 
 'He enrages, exasperates, but never leaves one indifferent' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Times Books of the Year 
 
 David Thomson is, among many other things, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition. His recent books include a biography of Nicole Kidman, Fan Tan (a novel written in collaboration with Marlon Brando) and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.

Delightful ... the world's leading sage about film ... It's like having the most film-literate pal you can imagine sitting beside you in a multiplex

This book sets the bar. There isn't a more intelligent, insightful and provocative guide to individual movies in the world

A dazzlingly authoritative treat ... crammed with insight and epigram

Eccentric, brilliant, scholarly, perverse, witty, egocentric and infuriating, sometimes all at once

A treasure trove for film buffs ... there is probably no finer contemporary writer on what makes the movies so unmissable

David Thomson is, among many other things, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition. His recent books include a biography of Nicole Kidman, Fan Tan (a novel written in collaboration with Marlon Brando) and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Born in London, he now lives in San Francisco.

This is veteran film writer David Thomson's personal, irreverent, hilarious and utterly original take on the 1,000 films he has most loved - and hated - from esteemed classics to forgotten curiosities, guilty pleasures to noir treats, horror gems to kitsch disasters. The result is probably the most enjoyable film book you will ever read (and you'll never think about The Sound of Music in the same way again).

Ingrid Bergman (Great Stars)

David Thomson is, among many other things, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fourth edition. His recent books include a biography of Nicole Kidman, Fan Tan (a novel written in collaboration with Marlon Brando) and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. His latest work is the acclaimed Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London, he now lives in San Francisco.

'Ingrid Bergman was far more than just a sweet, virtuous, "natural" Swedish girl - she was a dark sensualist over whom many men might go mad. Her very gaze delivered a climate of adult romantic expectation.' 
 
Adored by millions for her luminous beauty and elegance, at the height of her career Ingrid Bergman commanded a love that has hardly ever been matched, until her marriage fell apart and created an international scandal. Here renowned film writer David Thomson gives his own unique and original take on a woman who was constantly driven by her passions and by her need to act, even if it meant sacrificing everything.

Bette Davis (Great Stars)

'She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful ... But it was her edge that made her memorable - her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others.' 
 
Bette Davis was the commanding figure of the great era of Hollywood stardom, with a drive and energy that put her contemporaries in the shade. She played queens, jezebels and bitches, she could out-talk any male co-star, she warred with her studio, Warner Bros, worked like a demon, got through four husbands, was nominated for seven Oscars and - no matter what - never gave up fighting. This is her story.

Gary Cooper (Great Stars)

'Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight.' 
 
On screen he was the ultimate all-American hero: lean, laconic and masculine, a lone sheriff battling his enemies in High Noon, or a tough individualist in The Fountainhead. Off screen he bedded a host of leading ladies and carefully honed his image, making hundreds of movies and winning two Oscars in the process. Acclaimed film writer David Thomson explores the career and the contradictions of 'Coop', the star who lived the dream in the golden age of Hollywood.

Humphrey Bogart (Great Stars)

'Look, I'm hardly pretty, he seems to say. I sound like gravel; I look rough and tough; and, honest, I don't give you the soft, foolish answers the pretty boys will give you. You may not like what I say, but you better believe it.' 
 
He became a legend as 'Bogie', the world-weary, wise-cracking outsider, but in reality Humphrey Bogart was plagued by doubts and demons. He was born upper-class yet made his name playing mavericks, drank with the rat pack and met four wives on set - including his great love, Lauren Bacall - yet always mistrusted stardom. Here David Thomson, one of film's most provocative writers, reveals the man behind cinema's greatest icon.

Europe Since Napoleon

A history of Europe since Napoleon, covering all of the main topics of that period.

David Thomson

What Thomson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling

One of the liveliest, most literate, productive, provocative and daring movie critics

A Revisionist History of the Movies

‘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 as Charlie … Every lowlife can be a Corleone.’ 
 
Every flicker of light has its shadow. In this masterful reassessment of the whole arc of movie history, David Thomson, film’s wisest and most penetrating critic, shows us how cinema has entranced and transported us, but also profoundly changed us. 
 
From the earliest days of the first picture shows to the screens of today, Thomson glories in the great movies. Sharp, arresting readings of films from Metropolis to Rear Window, The Godfather to Anora can be found in these pages. Yet there is unease, too, at how cinema suckered us into a fantasy neverland that only looks like life. Hungry for spectacle and happy endings, submitting to voyeurism and villainy, we have let films change the way we experience reality; a habit of passivity that may have even betrayed our culture and our politics. 
 
As Thomson says, ‘This is our history, and our show.’ The result of a lifetime of immersion and reflection, this book is a reckoning and a testament from a writer who sees like no other.

David Thomson

Praise for A Sudden Flicker of Light

The best writer on film in our time

What Thomson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling

A giant in the world of film criticism

The best writer on film in our time

What Thomson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling

A giant in the world of film criticism

The best writer on film in our time

What Thomson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling

A giant in the world of film criticism

Books by David Thomson

Series by David Thomson

Great Stars

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