While Roger Ebert remains as my favorite movie critic, close behind is David Thomson. His love of movies vastly eclipses mine, but his tastes and my tastes coincide on many films.
“By “the movies”, incidentally, he [Thomson] means Hollywood, with a side order of established European and east Asian arthouse: he takes us from the cine-prehistory of photographer Eadweard Muybridge to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation with its sinister Ku Klux Klan hero-worship, Chaplin, Stroheim, Hitchcock, Capra, Renoir, Bogart, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch, Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, Scorsese’s GoodFellas, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (“Is it drive or dream?”), Kirk Douglas and his alleged rape of Natalie Wood, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, Sean Baker’s Anora, Tracey Emin’s Why I Never Became a Dancer and much more.” (Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Mon 20 Jul 2026)
I’ve read several histories of Hollywood, but A Sudden Flicker of Light is a distillation of the 40 books David Thomson has written. Thomson seemingly has seen every movie ever made. And, he has strong opinions about all of them. Some might quibble about Thomson’s fixation on profit and losses in the film industry. Some might bristle at Thomson’s provocative generalizations about classic movies.
Thomson proclaims Steven Spielberg as “the most decisive figure in the history of film, a guy who came upon an art experimenting with difficulty or doubt and talked it in off the ledge”.
While reading A Sudden Flicker of Light I would get a vague sense that this could be David Thomson’s last book–he’s 85 years old. But A Sudden Flicker of Light demonstrates he still has his wits and his critical senses. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Fade away — 1
- A couple on the beach — 3
2. The sea is moving — 9
3. Who’s in charge? — 23
4. Like lightning — 37
5. Going to Death Valley — 47
6. Our metropolis — 57
7. Attention must be paid — 69
8. Wait a minute — 77
9. Cutting could be cuter — 93
10. Vagrants in the limelight — 109
11. Style and nature — 127
12. The scorpion and the frog — 139
13. Hitler’s hand — 153
14. A cobra and the rats — 167
15. Fatale — 183
16. Voyeur beware — 195
17. The waves — 200
18. Ain’t life grand? — 225
19. “I’m with you” — 241
20. Our lap dance — 261
21. The big boys — 281
22. Look — 303
23. “Quiet, piggy? — 317
Fade out — 323
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS — 325
SOURCE NOTES –– 329
INDEX — 347