The Big Screen

"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 of 'the screen': beginning with Muybridge and tracing careers ranging from Korda to Renoir to Hawkes to Mizoguchi, to David Lynch and Tarantino, then swerving over to television shows such as I Love Lucy and The Sopranos. Thomson has found and created a marvelous plot for the history of film, with insights and revelations on every page--as well as a few MacGuffins. He is our most argumentative and trustworthy historian of the screen." --Michael Ondaatje, author of The Cat's Table

"David 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." --David Denby, author of Snark and film critic at The New Yorker

"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 that 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