David Thomson is a revered British writer on film — a critic, historian and author of more than 40 books — who has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “without doubt, the greatest living film historian”; by the New York Times as “among the most ardent cinephiles of the past half-century… sometimes, his books deliver greater pleasures than the multiplex”; and by The Atlantic as the writer of “the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael.”
Thomson is best known for a giant tome that was first published in 1975 under the title A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, and that was updated and reissued five times since, most recently in 2014, as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. In it, he profiles a wide array of figures from across film history — from household names like Cary Grant and Julia Roberts to behind-the-scenes masters like graphic artist Saul Bass and film editor and sound designer Walter Murch — with not just facts but also opinions, which are often contrarian and always thought-provoking.
The Biographical Dictionary was selected, in a 2023 survey of film industry heavyweights conducted by THR, as one of the 100 greatest film books of all time, and in a 2010 poll of critics and writers coordinated by Sight and Sound as the single best film book of all time. The late film critic Roger Ebert once declared that it “does the best job in the fewest words of capturing the essence of its hundreds of subjects,” and the award-winning author Geoff Dyer has described it as “not only an indispensable book about cinema, but one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time.”
