Moments That Made the Movies

by David Thomson

In his first fully illustrated work, David Thomson breaks new ground by focusing in on a series of moments—which his readers will also experience in beautifully reproduced imagery—from seventy-two films across a 100-year-plus span. An indispensable counterpart to both his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film (called “a miracle” by Sight and Sound) and his lauded recent history, The Big Screen (“a pungently written, brilliant book” according to David Denby), Moments takes readers on an unprecedented visual tour, where the specifics of the imagery the reader is seeing are inextricably tied to the text. Thomson’s moments range from a set of Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic—Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, The Red Shoes—to the unexpected—The Piano Teacher, Burn After Reading.


The excitement of Moments’s dynamic visuals will be matched only by the discussion it incites in film circles, as readers revisit their own list of memorable moments and then re-experience the films—both those included on Thomson's list and from their own life—as never before. Moments That Made the Movies will undoubtedly reaffirm Thomson's place as—according to John Banville—“the greatest living writer on the movies.”

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, History, Collections

319 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2013

About the author

David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book title piqued my interest, but it was the book cover that roped me in (Golden Boy floating face down in Norma Desmond's swimming pool). And admittedly, at P350, the price was hard to beat. (Thank you, Big Bad Wolf.)

I had never heard of David Thomson prior to reading this, but expectations were low, at first blush: the dust jacket's uncredited blurb made me cringe with "focussing." I thought it was a glaring misspelling, until a quick Google check explained its wider use in British English. (My bad.) Further reading revealed stilted syntax, inconsistent phrasing, and the occasional off-putting cliche. And yet the writing, though shabbily edited if at all, grew on me. It eventually felt like listening to a visiting professor doing a series of free-wheeling lectures on the movies, spoilers be damned. It is unapologetically spontaneous and conversational, and best of all, prone to digressions and trivia. Much like readers waxing nostalgic over our favorite books on Goodreads, Moments That Made the Movies is very much a vanity project of Mr Thomson's, and his passion for movies is as palpable as that of the brilliant movie critic, Roger Ebert. I too love the movies, and David Thomson has spurred me to make lists and insights of my own. His book gets the Beethoven card from me: “To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.” Play on, Mr Thomson.

* There are 70 films in this list, and 2 series of stills. Surprisingly, of the 70 films listed I have only seen in its entirety 23, some of which I intend to watch again (as I did with A Place in the Sun, immediately after finishing this book). I also intend to watch about half a dozen films written about here, with one or two titles of the New Wave genre the author is clearly partial to. My list of 23 movies, as of January 16, 2022:

1 M
2 Gone with the Wind +
3 Citizen Kane
4 The Lady Eve
5 Casablanca +
6 Laura
7 The Third Man
8 Sunset Boulevard +
9 A Place in the Sun +
10 Strangers on a Train +
11 A Star is Born
12 The Night of the Hunter
13 The Searchers
14 Sweet Smell of Success
15 Touch of Evil
16 Anatomy of a Murder
17 North by Northwest
18 Psycho
19 Klute
20 The Godfather +
21 The Shining +
22 When Harry Met Sally
23 Zodiac

+ Movies that endeared to me, in varying degrees, in varying seasons, and for varying reasons.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I meant to casually leaf through a few selections...impossible. About as much fun as books about movies get.

[Druss · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book for people who appreciate movies in greater detail than me but I appreciate the selection and found some new films to watch. I will watch some of the scenes again from films I’ve seen as a result. A different view and appreciated

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Thomson is my favorite film critic, partly because I like how he picks what he wants to review and doesn't have to be in the grind of publishing reviews week after week. He's can be his own man. Also, he's a very good writer.

I love his encyclopedia of film where he chronicles all the big names (according to him and their place in film history). Made him being British is also a reason why I think he stands out. He doesn't have to deal with the American film crap that comes out year after year. He just sticks to what he knows and is the better for it.

Anyway, I read maybe half of the movie moments in this current book, because most of the movie moments are from movies I know nothing about. I always get the feeling reading his work that his main objective is simply to get young people to see old movies.

He likes some pretty avant garde films; stuff that I would never willingly see, but because he goes into such detail about them, it makes me want to see them. Or maybe I feel like I have seen them as he goes on lovingly about them.

I kind of feel that I'm not a real genuine movie goer, as Thomson has some pretty defined tastes, and I watch a lot of mainstream movies.

Some of the films he goes into depth on are Casablanca, North by Northwest, Citizen Kane, and Meet me in St. Louis. There are a lot of French New wave films too from the fifties and sixties. Not many in the last twenty years, or at least some surprising choices, but I assume that thirty years from now, some other film critic will be remembering all the classics from the eighties and nineties.

[Yourfiendmrjones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomson does it again. A book that is closer to his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" series or his "Have You Seen...?", the "Moments..." he picks are illustrated with breath-taking stills from the films giving the reader a 3D entrance into how the critic's mind works. A perfect coffee table book and another great addition to David Thomson's pantheon of film writing.

[Teddy Farias · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers some good movies, some of my fave movies, loved it, with 200+ illustrations.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This large volume describes one moment in seventy one different movies, complete with stills that capture that scene. David Thomson is one of the great authorities of cinema, and I already have posted my views on two of his other books. The first film is by Eadweard Muybridge from 1887 and is titled "One Woman Standing, Another Sitting and Crossing Legs". Although Thomson tells us it "is not a movie, yet it is a series of sequential stills". The next "seems like a big jump" to 1928 and Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and so on through the years. Ending with The Coen Brothers "Burn After Reading" from 2008.

Typically, we get a couple of pages describing the moment and why it feels important. What it has done is to get me to look out for the following films, some for the first time, some that I haven't seen for a while:

"Touch of Evil" by Orson Welles 1958
"Anatomy of a Murder" by Otto Preminger 1959
"Blow Up" by Antonioni 1966
"Don't Look Now" by Nicolas Roeg 1973
"China Town" by Roman Polanski 1974
"Taxi Driver" by Martin Scorsese 1976
"Blue Velvet" by David Lynch 1986
"One False Move" by Carl Franklin 1992
"The Piano Teacher" by Michael Haneke 2001
"In the Cut" by Jane Campion 2003 "One of the great films of the twenty-first century"
"Birth" by Jonathon Glazer 2004
"A History of Violence" by David Cronenberg 2005
"Zodiac" by David Fincher 2007
"Burn After Reading" by Joel and Ethan Coen 2008 "One of the funniest films made this century"

There are obviously many great films missing from my list, but they are far too familiar to see before those above. Such as "Citizen Kane", "Gone with the Wind", "Strangers on a Train", "The Godfather", "Psycho" to name but a few.

[Diptakirti Chaudhuri]

This book is not a list of the greatest movie moments (as I thought when I bought it). It is a collection of moments that 'made' the movies they were in.
If the first list could be subjective (and we can always have our favourite moments), this is doubly so - because first, we have to decide what 'makes' a movie and then figure the moments when that happens.

But I calibrated my expectations (after the first few chapters), the book turned out to be more enjoyable, more educative than a collection of known/classic moments.

So if you're willing to go beyond the recent Hollywood we have seen, if you're okay with a book without Spielberg/Lucas/Tarantino, if you're willing to read about interesting sequences of lesser known films that were as intriguing as the ones we probably know, then you would enjoy the book.
There's a bit of Welles, Hitchcock, Wilder, Polanski, but probably not the ones we instinctively remember. That's the strength and the weakness of the book. And there also lies whether you'd like to read it or not.

[Christine Sinclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting concept from a great movie writer: Pick a moment from a famous (or lesser known) movie and describe how it feels, or what it does to you, or how it makes you think. I haven't seen all of these movies, by any means (particularly the French and Japanese films), and some I would definitely not have chosen (Burn After Reading?), but every discussion is thought-provoking. David Thomson makes us look at movies in a different way, and I will be giving a lot of these movies a second (or first!) look.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

During a 4 hour lull for a movie, I stopped into an Indigo in Toronto on Bloor St. W and got lost in several books, one of which was this one.

It's actually incredible the power of cinema and the breakdown of some of the most iconic and amazing moments ever recorded on film and audio.

I don't know if I'd own a book like this, but it was great to pass the time enveloped in the magic of the story again and the pages of the book.

[Ray Hubley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This handsomely designed and illustrated addition to David Thomson's irreplaceable library of film notation (i.e the 1000 title compendium: HAVE YOU SEEN?) stands as yet another triumph even if some of the later films in the collection do not quite live up to the earlier entries. His observations and especially the language he summons up in response to movie-going itself more than justifies the physical heft of this glossy coffee table edition.

[Tim Pieraccini · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Thomson is always worth reading, and one line from this book really stood out:
"So I can say that the most special and indelible and infinite effect in the movies is not made in a computer, it is a shot of the human face when something momentous is happening to that person."
Echoes of several of Ingmar Bergman's views, of course, but a good representation of Thomson's aim in this book.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite writer on film. Shaking my head all throughout this book, marveling at the intelligence and wonder of his prose. Truly inspiring to me.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slight. Doesn't exactly fulfill what it sets out to do. But David Thomson is a film critic I almost always enjoy reading.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Moments That Made the Movies contains some pleasingly atypical selections of both films and moments within them, but too many that seem generic. Even more surprisingly, Thomson's prose is for large stretches equally generic. Thomson is an excellent and astute critic, but seems too constricted by the conceit, the format, and the restrictions which he's placed upon himself. To his credit, he recognizes this, stating multiple times the flaws in the model, including the difficulty and/or impossibility of describing various scenes or moments, and the fact that those tend to be lesser films which can be reduced to one moment as opposed to being a cohesive greater whole at the expense of more memorable individual scenes. Rather than setting about disproving these various potential flaws of his attempt, however, he seems more willing to simply let his acknowledgments stand as excuses so that he can fall back on them and say "I told you so" when said shortcomings do in fact end up playing out.

The book is in some ways almost too personal; you want that personal touch, naturally, but what one loves most, perhaps especially in films, often can't easily be explained or rationalized, even by a professional, and Thomson's attempts to do so often feel like the explanation a joke, where much or all of the magic is systematically removed in the process and one is left feeling at the end as if they are clinically examining the disassembled parts of a now unrecognizable piece of machinery. The focus on specific moments can't help but bring to mind the listlessness of text trying to reproduce what originated as motion, even if it is in the admirable task of trying to evoke what makes it so beloved. The films are presented in such a way that does not especially give much new insight to someone who has seen them, nor present those unseen as being particularly compelling and worth seeking out, which leaves this book in the position of being perfectly serviceable and yet largely, if not wholly, unnecsssary. This ineffectiveness of the essays for each moment renders the book hardly better than just a list would have been, and in many ways this book best serves the function of a mere list, prompting the reader to create and compare the author's to her own.

There is barely distinguishable any of the freewheeling feel and passion that Thomson exudes in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film; that book, too, has its flaws to be sure, but could never be described as boring or joyless. Here, Thomson often lapses into a gloomy tone, as if nostalgically looking back to a type of movie which is without exception no longer made, but to accept this means to accept the dual fallacy that is always part and parcel of nostalgia, its two parts being that, implicitly, the memories are better than the reality, and two, that what is being mourned is definitviely in the past and is no more. Thomson seems to be actively trying to disprove the first part, arguing rather too forcefully at times in favor of moments, as if only barely able to convince himself, much less his readers, of the legitimacy of their greatness.

The book's formatting almost seems hyper-antic to counteract this glumness of tone, with multiple gaudy pull-quotes and would-be witty captions that feel cynically designed to distract from the prose itself. This feeling of trying to juice the material makes it feel even more substandard for Thomson than it does in its own right, and it does not exactly speak well of a text if a pull quote is needed for every brief (two to three page) essay, as if the material isn't compelling enough to command the reader's attention on its own. This flashiness becomes weary soon into the book and contiunes for another 250 pages. The text itself has a somewhat uneven feel as well, with tidbits of knowledge and trivia often feeling inserted arbitrarily, lacking a proper fit in the piece as is but included at the insistence of the author presumably, who may have too great a stature to be properly reined in in the editing process. (Such reining-in would also likely have included the excision of various would-be clever gibes that come across as forced and glib.) However, for a reader willing to play the role of editor and pick through the book for its own moments of merit, there are certainly a number of nuggets to be found, though likely not enough to be worth the effort or to make this book especially recommendable.

[Jarvo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what you'd make of this book if you weren't already familiar with David Thomson's work. Paradoxically if you are familiar with Thomson's work, you maybe frustrated by some of the repetition. Thomson's basic thesis is that we don't remember film's whole, it is normally two or three key moments that encapsulate a film for us. He proceeds to illustrate this by writing vignettes about key moments from 70 odd films spanning, near enough, the history of cinema.

The approach has weaknesses. This is not a history of cinema and sometimes films suffer when they are discussed sans context (although the book is good at some key historical turning points, such as the French New Wave and its impact on American cinema). As with all writing on film I suspect that sometimes it makes little sense if you haven't seen the movie in question (eg the entry on L'Eclipse). But it also has strengths - this is a Thames and Hudson book and is beautifully illustrated. It also mirrors Thomson's own strengths. Films are not just seen as the creation of the director and Thomson is particularly good at what it is that 'stars' bring to the movies (see the entry on Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco, for example), but he is also good at the roles of cinematographers, composers and producers. He is also both imaginative, you may think his interpretations are little more than flights of fantasy, and iconoclastic (I don't think much of most of his selections post 1990). When he is good, he is brilliant. I'd highlight the treatment of Sansho the Baliff, The Conformist, Citizen Kane, The Third Man, and, above all, The Searchers, the ending of which he captures in its full magnificance (and this is by one of John Ford's fiercest critics). But even when he is wrong he can be enlightening. In my book he mistreads both Taxi Driver and Don't Look Now, but both sections are well worth reading.

(Right at the start Thomson warns us that he is not going to discuss what has got excluded and why, but it is an inevitable that you will want to play this game. My two-penneth on what ought to have been there would include Vertigo - the moment when Judy 'becomes' Madeline (its suffused with green light you will remember it); the death of Kyz at the burning mill in the Seven Samurai (all four elements are in turmoil); either the moment when Claudia Cardinale first appears in The Leopard or when she re-appears in Eight and a half, transforming both films in the blink of an eye; Daniel Day Lewis squaring off with Paul Dano in There Will be Blood; or, finally, Robert de Niro in Raging Bull, rehearsing On the Waterfront into a mirror - this is as good as acting can get, notwithstanding Day Lewis and Dano).

If you like films I'd recommend both that you get this and read it, it is not just a coffee table book.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think David Thomson has to write books for anyone but himself anymore, and this book seems to be mostly about his own reveling in the movie moments he most likes. You're better off with his Biographical Dictionary of Film to learn about the movies and stars. The narrative of this book is mainly You Gotta See This plus a reflection on how most of these movies are about watching movies. Which is more reveling on Thomson's part, I think.

I want to say that this book's best feature is its lavish illustrations, but actually many of the moments (perhaps because they're so specialized) are rather fuzzily illustrated, and the heft and feel of the book is more that of a textbook than a coffee-table showpiece. And it is listed at $39.95 (I got mine for a buck at a library sale).

The best thing about the book for me (besides the stills from Laura and The Bandwagon) is Thomson's discussion of recent movies I've missed but which seem terrific when Thomson revels in them (e.g., Birth, In the Cut, A History of Violence). I'll have to make it a point to see them.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most scholarly of works, but not a trivial listing of scenes either. Rather, an interesting collection that seems so natural that you wonder why no one has done this before. Each moment presents a glimpse into a film that makes you want to see it in its full context; the whole collection reminding you of one of those "desert island movie lists" that you talk about with friends, or perhaps on a first date as you try to figure out who 'who is this person?' Sure, there are some obvious moments that are missing while other less obvious moments are included, but that only adds to its charm. It's a fun if not thought provoking read that will have you contemplating your own favorite movie moments.

[Adrian]

Esteemed critic Thomson picks his most memorable movie moments. He narrows it down to the top 100 or so and gives explanations for them. These kinds of lists are very personal what is memorable for him is not necessarily so for you. Thomson has a weakness for early comedies and dance. Some French and Japanese movies are included. Even in movies I'd have chosen myself he has picked scenes that are odd. Frankly a good bit of Thomson's criticism is lost on me. I did pick up names of a handful of films that I've not seen and would like to.

[Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at memorable scenes in certain movies that have been seen as samples of outstanding film making, even though in some cases the film as a whole may not have been that remarkable. I've only seen 23 of the more than 70 films included here, but I would agree with the author's selections on most of the films I've seen. That includes films like Chinatown, Blow-Up, The Passenger, One False Move, and others. The book is nicely illustrated with many photographs and is a good quick way to discover films that you might want to see for the first time.

[Anthony Peronto · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixture of the repetitive and the brilliant, David Thompson's picks of cinematic moments is a really enjoyable read with some great pictures. And this being a personal list, it's not too surprising how many of his picks involve sex or sexual undertones (some obvious and some reaching). It's not a fault, it just gets old quickly. Admitting how his words and pictures can't accurate describe the scenes, Thompson's writing is persuasive and touching enough that you want to see the films right away. I really enjoyed it, slight flaws and all.

[Jeroen Berndsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomson has a nice writing style and a lifetime of insight in analyzing movies to back it up. His choice of movies in this book is diverse, with not just the obvious choices but also some more or less uncommon ones.

This is not a history of movies, nor does it aspire to be. This is a personal selection of movie moments that made a particular and lasting impression on the author, and leave it to Thomson to explain why.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can tell Thomson had a lot of fun with this one. A great book to pick through. A reminder of why our favorites resonate to us, and an intro to some future caves. My Queue just grew quite a bit.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomson riffs on scenes from classic films. Interesting as always but nonessential.

[Todd Glaeser · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book does exactly what you want a book like this to do - remind you of amazing films that you have seen and suggest films that you should see.

[Laura Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book. I really enjoyed it.

[Douglas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won this book through Goodreads.com. The author explores what he considers great moments in film. He does not rank these moments but lists them chronologically.