I think this was great, I think that it’s really changed the way I’m going to watch films. Xoxo

Apparently only about 5 good movies have been made since the 1960s ... this book is the equivalent of "Old Man Yells at Cloud. "

After all this time you'd have thought I knew how...David Thomson has an unusual way of writing about film. Although immensely knowledgeable about both the history and craft of film making he eschews jargon to try and focus on the experience of watching films and why they did, or didn't work for him. In outline this looks like a quite conventional introduction to films with chapters on things like the shot, editing, narrative, the relative importance of actors, directors, and the other people wh...

Disappointed. Usually I've found Thomson's books to be more insightful, humorous and informative, and was eager to learn, after almost 70 years of watching movies, to find out if I was doing it wrong. Guess not. There really wasn't anything new here, except for a few autobiographical anecdotes which were delightful. He has a wealth of cinematic knowledge which I've enjoyed over the years, through both hearing him in person on several occasions and in reading other works of his.

I expected this to be good because it only took the author 10 pages to compare a Gatorade commercial to "Triumph of the Will", but then slowly whatever potential insights I could gleam from it declined into the kind of dense and bad writing infused with personal hangups, contradictions, and irrelevant interjections that gave me serious flashbacks to reading Howard Bloom.Also the extremely creepy and constant discussion of actresses and young women in general wasn't pleasant.

How to Watch a Movie is a pretty good but significantly flawed book (well, okay, it has one big flaw, that I'll get to in more detail below). It is egregiously mistitled, though that's not the flaw I'm concerned with. While learning how to watch a movie—actively engaging with the content of a film—sounds like an excellent subject, that's not at all what Thomson's after here. A more accurate name would be How I Watch A Movie, or even How I Watch Movie, given how frequently (and apparently at rand...

A well-thrown pebble that skips across the surface of cinephilia. Could be a handy Film Lit 101 book, but beyond that lacks any real lessons or insight. At least it's a quick read.If I didn't know better, I'd swear the author was a producer on the Robert Redford film "All is Lost". There's no other explanation for that film being cited as an example as often as it is.

Didn't see the point.

Dry, text book style - Roger Ebert was more fun to read.

When it comes to the history of Hollywood and film criticism there's nobody like David Thomson. This isn't a textbook on the subject but rather a rambling discourse. My Netflix list just doubled.

me starting this book was at the beginning of my reading slump unfortunately. but thanks to it though, in these past months i gradually overcame it while reading it slowly. now i want to read a lot of books finishing this. my god, it was a ride. i realized how different i view movies thanks to it, definitely added some flavor to the concept of watching movies for me. me and the author have a lot of different opinions, i mean, but as i'm really interested in cinema in a huge geek level and i just...

A strange book. Always stimulating and highly readable - whatever else you think, David Thomson writes beautifully; but the title is not descriptive of the book. It's a guide to how the author watches movies, and the opinions he holds. Some of them are engaging; some of them are odd (e.g. the idea that Empire of The Sun is Steven Spielberg's best film). Not bad - but not as good as I had hoped.

I'll be blunt: I hate this book.The problem isn't with the information author David Thomson provides, or with the fact that anyone who has spent any reasonable amount of time reading and learning about film, film theory, and film criticism will nothing new here; there are always going to be people coming to film with a serious interset who need a place to begin.No, the problem with HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE is that as a writer and critic, David Thomson is fucking insufferable. Thomson is obnoxiously

3.5 stars - You don't have to look very far to see that this book has some pretty low ratings on Goodreads, but I wonder how many of those reviewers1) have never read anything else by Thomson2) took the title as a literal textbook3) are perhaps guilty of falling prey to one of Thomson's main points, that many people watch films simply because they want to be entertained while not having to think too hard.Yes, the book is uneven, Thomson is pretentious and is often a windbag, but there's some rea...

Incredibly self absorbed rarely dealing with the central issue from the book, also apparently a decent movie hasn’t been made since the 60s.

Books on the movies always have something of interest for the reader, if only because they represent a person’s responses to films one may or may not have personally seen. This could reinforce one’s own prejudices, or may stimulate a re-consideration of the work in question; and underlying all this there is the possibility that one might disagree completely with the author. None of these considerations are necessarily inimical to the reader’s enjoyment in the process.Thompson’s book is no except...

Thomson is the author of many books and articles on film. For the cinemaphile, he has written The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, which I have reviewed and still enjoy reading.This recent book is his take on many issues including the changes in technology that take us from the movie theater to the 4 or 5 inch screen of our phone. Thomson is a controversial movie critic. He often seems to adopt an attitude of how only his perspective can possibly be the correct one. He can be persuasive, but...

David Thomson has a many-decades long career as a film critic and scholar. This book of his has a rather misleading title, for while “How to Watch a Movie” might lead you to expect a clear and straightforward introduction to the technical aspect of cinema (how shots are constructed, lighting, editing, etc.), that is not what you actually get here. Instead, the book is Thomson’s very impressionistic account of how he personally approaches various films that broadly belong to the mid-century canon...

I’ve really had a plateful of old white men woozily blurting forth about their distant childhoods, O the poignant poverty, sexual scarcity, familial wit wisdom and woolly warmth, distant father, cloying mama, oh the songs and the laughter, the tears and the bonks on the cranium, ooh the discovery of Ingmar Bergman and the Bride of Wittgenstein – I had Woody Allen’s version (Radio Days), Colum McCann’s version (Let the Great World Spin), Julian Barnes’ version (The Sense of an Ending) and now I g...

This book topic veers off the path of my normal book taste onto a side road of "hmmm...this sounds interesting." Recommended by a man (they seem to always have varied book tastes in a way that women do not), I thought I would expand my horizons and read something I've never read about and because it I felt like it at the time. And it proved to be what I sought it out for - interesting. It covers topics like: music in a film, what kinds of movie shots there are, difference between fact and fictio...