"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, Gary Cooper, 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...

"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...

A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world
"In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends—how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original."—Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker...

A married couple takes an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences.

A critic shares professional insights into how to derive more from a film experience, analyzing a range of iconic films to reveal metaphorical artistry techniques in the acting, filming, dialogue, and music.

In just a few years, what used to be an immobile piece of living room furniture, which one had to sit in front of at appointed times in order to watch sponsored programming on a finite number of channels, morphed into a glowing cloud of screens with access to a near-endless supply of content available when and how viewers want it. With this phenomenon now a common cultural theme, a writer of David Thomson's stature delivering a critical history, or...

"The celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film explores how sexuality in the movies and the performances of iconic actors have reflected cultural experimentation and the fulfillment of latent desires." --