David Thomson

Editor’s note: The first in a series of essays looking back at the films and filmmakers of the past decade.   What happened at the movies in the 2000s? There must be thousands of ways of answering that question, and I’m not sure how many of them are cheerful. On......

It was late on October 25 of last year that I got my last sight of Steven Bach. We had done an onstage gig together at the Writers Institute in Albany, New York: We had shown Renoir’s Partie de Campagne, all about passing time and lost illusions, and we had......

This is the David Lean centenary: He was born a hundred years ago in Croydon, south London, and raised as a Quaker and the son of an accountant. That meant that as a boy, he was not allowed to go to the cinema. It wasn’t a happy childhood. Lean was......

Courtesy of LACMA (Click to enlarge) City Lights As John Adams on TV lengthens into April, and overlaps with LACMA’s series on Brits in Hollywood — “A Sterling Legacy,” some wit has called it, as the pound devours the dollar — it’s worth noting how, in Adams, Jefferson and Franklin......

An old lady once told me, “You never know what a picture meant, what it really meant” — and her great opal eyes widened to show how vast and heady a thing meaning might be — “unless you saw it the weekend it opened.” (Click to enlarge) They're young. They're......

Laura Hunt is dead. We see her in flashbacks, when she was a pretty girl on the make and on the rise in New York advertising. She was Gene Tierney, and she dressed better and picked up smoother manners once Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) took her on as his protegee......

Away from the AMCs, P.F. Chang’s–fronted malls, coffee-shop chains and packs of teenybopper wolves lies a sleepy hamlet of Burbank that’s a shopper’s alternative, nay paradise, to the ever-bustling downtown. Each one of the mostly vintage and antique shops that line Magnolia Park’s quaint and quiet (so quiet you can......

It’s generally agreed by film critics and historians alike that Roberto Rossellini is hard to place, and harder to recommend properly. One reason for this, I think, is that — out of respect and esteem — people have been shy of admitting that Rossellini was a hustler, a chameleon and......

Once upon a time, the English were quite proud of their murders. The public knew the names and the details of husbands who had poisoned their wives — domestic problems that got out of hand. George Orwell wrote an essay once about “the decline of the English murder,” as if......