2016 AT THE MOVIESPART ONE : HOLLYWOODTHE BESTLove And Mercy – As a Brian Wilson fan I resisted seeing this, I thought it was really quite a creepy idea - he has been turned into a suffering saint - but finally I crumbled & was humbled – it was great, could not have been better.The King’s Speech - as a hearty disliker of the British Royal family I resisted seeing this – what, a movie which inculcates sympathy for these tiresome parasites? but finally I crumbled & was humbled – it was great, coul...

Thomson blogs. It's like reading GR, which is both good, bad and that's enough for now.I did not finish reading 1,000 reviews, but I did abt 200. So far. Thomson has written film revs for The Guardian and The New Republic that I've admired, so his effort to rival The Kael (and her "5001 Nights at the Movies," 1982), intrigued me. Plus his tome, 2008, takes us into the 21st century. But it's disappointing. The essays, all about 1,200 words each, read like humdrum "homework." Or improv bloggery. G...

Update 12/31/17:Three more movies seen before the end of the horrid year 2017:Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - ***Die Hard (r) My wife had never seen it, and it was playing in Bury St. Edmunds one night only. Holds up amazingly well, given how many action movies of that era are cringe-inducing now. Yippekayee.Star Wars: The Last JediI never thought I would type these words: Mark Hamill is great in this movie. Seriously. I'm not even kidding.Annual check on glass ceiling of directing films: 105 movies...

I own Thomson's "New Biographical Dictionary of Film", which is excellent, so I picked this one up from the library to 'audition' it and see if I wanted to buy it (I did). It's a monster of a book, covering 1,000 films, one per page, with Thomson's personal thoughts on each one, which, being nowhere near as objective as a review might be expected to be, are fascinating and often great fun to read. And Thomson's encyclopedic knowledge of detail always tells me something I didn't know, even about

Certainly one of the best of its kind. I found I had to keep pen and paper nearby to keep a list of all the things I needed to see and hadn't. His attention to detail, from production and studio details to set design to minor cast members is uncanny. The other fascinating thing is his lack of attachment to any particular time period or part of the world. He is equally at home in studio system Hollywood as post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe. And while I don't always agree with his opinions, they ar...

Critic David Thomson had been an ardent cinephile for half a century by the time he wrote this book in 2006–2007. Though the one thousand films briefly discussed are virtually all part of the established canon of international film art, this is not the author’s “Top 1000”, for not infrequently Thomson’s opinion on the given film is a negative one. Each film gets about five solid paragraphs where Thomson shares his personal views. The entries vary widely. Sometimes Thomson wants to situate the fi...

This makes for fascinating reading. I stumbled upon this compendium of reviews at an Exclusive Book sale, picked it up, and it was not long before I was hooked. At first I simply wanted to check Thomson's views against my own on many of my favourite movies; now I'm using it to guide me through my own classic film curriculum. I love this man's erudite turn of phrase and the compact manner in which he delivers his extensive knowledge and expertise.

1,000 movie reviews. Quite expansive and intelligent. Written by esteemed cinema critic and scholar Brit David Thomson in 2008, the 79-year-old has been called by "The Atlantic Monthly" as "probably the greatest living film critic and historian" who "writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael."I've seen a lot of movies and I have seen about a third of the films included in the book. Maybe a bit too much of an emphasis on international cinema, as well as silent-...

Wonderful essays on 1000 films. It's insightful, informative, witty, and only very occasionally pretentious... or ponderous. The 80-year old Thomson is our greatest film writer, a national treasure, and should be preserved forever in the Library of Congress. If only.I typically read most "prose" (fiction or non-fiction) books on the Kindle. But...I was today years old when I learned that you should always know the actual size of a book in a print edition before you start the digital version. It

Self-important prattle from a typical British pseudo-intellectual, who mistakes indiscriminate disdain for class, while extremely low on both information and insight.

Everybody loves a list. The American Film Institute, for example, gets a couple of TV specials every year out of listing the 100 best movies in some genre or other. And every film critic in the country is annually obligated to come up with a list of the top ten movies of the year.But a list of 1,000 films? The vastness of such a project betrays its absurdity: No one's critical sensibility is so fine-tuned as to allow a convincing distinction in quality between the thousandth film on the list and...

David Thomson enjoys an enormous reputation as a film critic, fed, above all, by his Biographical Dictionary of Film, voted the best film book ever by a panel of his peers in Sight and Sound. Its perhaps telling then that he has chosen to complement that with a book of similar size, this time dedicated to films themselves. And these are, I believe, his most successful books by some distance. Is there, perhaps, something in his approach that is at its best when dealing with the details, rather th...

David Thomson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf, 2008)I am enough of a film geek that I have a favorite critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum. He's witty, acerbic, and all too clear-eyed (enough to make an amateur like me wonder where I, or he, has gone so horribly wrong on certain movies). But after reading David Thomson's capsule notes on a thousand movies ranging from stuff everyone's written column inches on to movies even you have never heard of, Rosenbaum has some comp...

A wonderful reference book for film fans. It consists of one page reviews of 1,000 films selected by Mr Thomson from the many thousands that he must have watched. They have been chosen either because they are personal favourites or because they are have particular significance in the history the cinema. Also included are the occasional TV series (The Sopranos) or TV drama (A Question of Attribution). It is the perfect coffee table book. It can be picked up for 2 minutes or 20 - the hard part is

In answer to the title question, I haven't seen all one thousand of the films Thomson chooses to discuss, but I have seen a lot of them (about 600, I believe). I can barely (if at all) remember some of those, but I did see them.The 1000 films aren't "the best" or anything similar; they are the films Thomson wanted to discuss. Each film gets less than one full page. Thomson writes that the first movie discussed in the book (which is arranged in alphabetical order) is Abbott and Costello Meet Fran...

This mammoth essay collection reviews 1000 movies since the origins of this art form. The author strived to cover every year from 1895 when the Lumière Brothers originated it to 2009, the last year to make it into the book, all main geographies, directors, key actors and genres. Needless to say it’s highly uneven. I am a movie lover and have seen hundreds of the movies in the book. Yet, some of the essays were obscure or highly annoying as the author seems to enjoy rubbishing well loved movies a...

A small matter of the copy of the book received being dusty, musty and looking-like-a-used-one should not stand in the way of 5 stars being accorded to ‘Have You Seen?’. Many cinematic gems and cinematic faux-gems have been lent an ‘opinion’ by David Thomson; and opinionated he is. Its a book which should find an appeal with everyone..film buff or otherwise. The author provides at times a cultural or sociological or economic or literary twist to the theatrical entertainer (or non-entertainer) an...

A guide to 1,000 films, from established classics to forgotten curiosities. The emphasis of the page-long introductions is on the circumstances under which the films were made: studio, director, actors, etc., rather than the detailed plot or artistic aspects of film making. Besides the unavoidable emphasis on Hollywood (as the book is written by an American film writer), there is a relatively generous amount of European and Japanese films included as well, although by far not enough to my taste....

If you are looking for one book of movie recommendations in the age of streaming, blu-ray etc then this is what I would recommend.Written for the DVD age, it is timeless because of the idiosyncratic, pithy entries (limited to a page) that each film (or in some cases, TV series) gets. I first read the book on it's release 10 years ago (2008) and with the brilliant HD restorations of movies available on blu-ray or via sites such as BFI Player, Mubi and FilmStruck (soon to be closed, sadly) I bough...

I briefly flirted with the idea of studying film. The flirtation didn't last long because of reasons, but I still have a deep and encompassing love for movies and the study of them. Because of that, I decided that if I couldn't study film I'd read every book about film on the subject I could find and watch all the great films (or at least the films critics say are great). Therefore, a book like "Have You Seen...?" is right up my alley. I don't know anything about David Thomson's work, but he r