Over the last few years, despair has permeated the film industry. Paramount is going to buy Warner Bros. Mass layoffs are rampant. AI is the worst, and it’s everywhere. Mid-budget movies and romantic comedies are becoming endangered species. Arthouse films are struggling at theaters because their intended audience has gotten used to watching movies at home. The sky is falling. When confronted with this harsh reality, film lovers usually seek out something comforting to calm their anxieties, maybe rewatching a favorite movie or enjoying Criterion’s cheerful Closet Videos series. But although I also find solace in such pick-me-ups, nothing in recent memory has restored my devotion to cinema as much as David Thomson’s new book A Sudden Flicker Of Light, which is ironic considering its discouraged tone.
If anything, the volume’s subtitle, A Revisionist History Of Movies, undersells the longtime critic and historian’s deep misgivings about an art form he’s spent his life adoring. But having turned 85 in February, the author of the encyclopedic, argument-starting New Biographical Dictionary Of Film finds his fondness for film increasingly replaced by regret and suspicion. The result is a poignant rejection of the optimism most of us cling to whenever cinema’s cultural importance is threatened. And yet, A Sudden Flicker Of Light‘s cold-water assessment of cinema’s failures and limitations is bracing—and a reminder that an underappreciated part of loving movies is sometimes being glum about their future. If we didn’t care so passionately, our devotion wouldn’t occasionally hurt so damn much.
Some readers, though, don’t want anybody dampening their film fandom. In his Atlantic review titled “Movies Are Good, Actually,” Michael O’Donnell essentially tells Thomson to lighten up. “The dour feeling that this book produces is the exact opposite of the invigorating excitement that [Martin] Scorsese conveys when discussing movie magic,” complains O’Donnell. “The distance between an artist such as Scorsese and a critic such as Thomson is as expansive as an open horizon compared with a dark room.” O’Donnell declares that “movies matter as an art form because the best ones graze our souls … Movies aren’t bad for us. Some days I think they keep my heart from slowing to a stop. It will take a great deal more than this sour book to convince me otherwise.”
But that blind Pollyannaish positivity misses the big picture—and Thomson’s point. Of course many great, life-affirming films have been made; Thomson doesn’t disagree. In A Sudden Flicker Of Light, he chronicles cinema’s century-plus history, adopting a stream-of-conscious approach that is often poetic. He is taken to calling the movies “movie,” almost as if they’re a euphoric state or incurable condition. (When discussing actors’ skillfulness at embodying different types of characters, Thomson observes, “That instability of identity is a primary lesson in movie.”) The man is besotted by the art form, but his admiration is mixed with musings that feel like the confessions of a haunted protagonist narrating his own novel. This starts with the first page, in which he wonders about society’s increased bombardment with images: “[T]he culture is left in mounting dismay over what is real, or what matters. For we can now fabricate the imagery—we have bypassed light and nature—so that we no longer trust it or our response. Are we smart enough to handle such things? Or is our smartness just a rumor from out of the past?”
Accuse Thomson of being grandiose, but there’s no denying the potency of his buyer’s remorse for an art form that, for the entirety of his existence, has been at the forefront of our collective consciousness. Now, near the end of his life, he’s debating what movies really did for him, and us, after all these years. But contrary to what O’Donnell thinks, this debate is neither dour nor sour—it’s galvanizing. Because movies are currently so embattled, its champions have adopted the guise of cheerleaders, loudly insisting that the medium is still resonant, that movie theaters remain magical, that cinema’s heyday is not long gone. That’s a reassuring way to think, but it is not the only way, and A Sudden Flicker Of Light slaps us across the face with a different viewpoint. The book is the devil on every movie lover’s shoulder, the one who whispers that we’ve wasted our lives watching and thinking about movies. Thomson’s perspective isn’t necessarily more true because it’s more despondent, but it is vital because we hear it far less often.
Throughout the book, his disillusioned tone recalls the sobering speech Howard Beale delivers near the end of Network. Not the “mad as hell” monologue but the one much later, when Beale begins to doubt the power of the people to change the world for the better. “I think that was it, fellas,” Beale admits, adding, “At the bottom of all our terrified souls we know that democracy is a dying giant—a sick, sick dying, decaying political concept writhing in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a world power. … What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it.”
Thomson is talking about the movies, not the U.S., but the further you get into the book, the more you sense that, to his mind, the two are synonymous. Growing up in Britain before moving to the U.S. in his 30s, he sees American films as a way to understand this country’s great promise and maddening contradictions. A Sudden Flicker Of Light‘s downcast vibe is almost assuredly exacerbated by the rise of Donald Trump, who Thomson casts as a monstrous phantom figure roaming the book’s hallways, occasionally popping up in the prose like a jump scare, representing a nightmarish outgrowth of our cursed fascination with film. The book doesn’t go so far as to say the movies created Trump, but Thomson views him as the latest (and vilest) manifestation of America’s worst tendencies—our racism, our sexism, our xenophobia—that are similarly embodied in the films we consume.
Films have long been a target. They’re the cause of school shootings. They promote promiscuity. They advocate deviant behavior. The shallowness of these arguments makes them easy to ignore, in part because the accusers often know nothing about movies. This is why A Sudden Flicker Of Light‘s attacks carry a sharper sting. Thomson’s criticisms are backed by expertise and close study, his ongoing awe for film making room for his reservations. He takes the medium to task for upholding damaging stereotypes and outdated cultural ideas. He condemns the dearth of women directors. He worries that movies have conditioned us to be passive spectators. And he does it all witheringly. “In so many respects, [George] Lucas is uninteresting; he has never really thought to advance on his or our teenage attitudes,” Thomson contends. “But with Steven Spielberg, unwittingly yet with zeal and in good humor, he ended the best hope for American cinema.”
Where other older critics might get grumpy about “woke” readings of movies, Thomson engages in more progressive modes of film analysis. This engagement has clearly inspired him to question his own blind spots. Singling out the abhorrent racism of The Birth Of A Nation is hardly controversial, but it’s rare for a Hollywood history to recount the merits of Kirk Douglas and then add, bluntly, “I believe he also raped Natalie Wood when she was a teenager.” Thomson praises Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning 2024 film but admits, “[T]here is no question that part of my pleasure with Anora came from watching Mikey Madison in a state of undress and steadily lap dancing in her for-hire description as a sex worker,” tying the comment into a self-critical examination of the male gaze. “[M]en are criticized as Peeping Toms who turn into overbearing patriarchs,” Thomson writes. “That case is beyond dispute and I am a recidivist offender.”
The Godfather is one of A Sudden Flicker Of Light‘s key movies, not just gracing the book’s cover but illustrating Thomson’s second thoughts about cinema’s lasting value. The Godfather is a film he once boisterously praised. Now he sees that 1972 landmark from a warier perspective, lamenting its portrait of patriarchy, its seductive depiction of violence, and its emphasis on Michael’s soulless accumulation of power. “[T]here have been many celebrations of its scope and its detail, many with merit and in kindly admiration,” Thomson notes. “But the nature of that alarming response has not been explored too much. So the deathly culture of the movie has been more imitated or acted out than diagnosed. It took me decades to get out from under its allure.”
Thomson may not change your opinion, but he gets you thinking, forcing you to defend your position. Critics of the book like O’Donnell point out that the movies don’t actually explain Trump’s rise to power. But Thomson brings him up—along with Hitler and other historic villains—to rebut some people’s confident belief that the movies inherently make us a more enlightened, compassionate society. (There’s a reason Roger Ebert’s “movies are like a machine that generates empathy” quote is so widely embraced.) In A Sudden Flicker Of Light, Thomson is talking less about movies being bad or bad for us than he is questioning our rosy view of their unlimited potential—a view he once shared. Movies are incredible, Thomson suggests, but they’re not everything. Loving something means admitting when it falls short.
Even when Thomson is dead wrong—he suggests that watching movies is better at home—A Sudden Flicker Of Light is blessedly free of bitterness or cynicism. Only someone who still loves movies could fill a book about the medium’s failures with such melancholy beauty. A spiritual exhaustion has overtaken him, yet it reads like Thomson’s plea to be disabused of his own fatalism.
If this ends up being his final statement on the movies, it’s a gauntlet thrown down for the rest of us. Calling A Sudden Flicker Of Light an empty downer is to ignore how many people who work in film—critics, journalists, publicists, executives, screenwriters, actors, directors, the folks on set scraping together a living doing the unglamorous jobs—share Thomson’s gloom. Too often, we feel the need to defensively swat that gloom away, to double down in our faith that movies will endure. But it’s important to sit in that doubt. Maybe cinema’s golden age is over. Maybe films do mostly reflect our worst traits. Maybe it was foolish to spend so much time sitting in the dark staring at other people living fictional lives. The best films allow for such nuance, self-reflection, and uncertainty—they challenge our most deeply held beliefs. A Sudden Flicker Of Light honors the movies’ greatness by being as thorny and complicated as the art form that Thomson, try as he might, simply cannot quit.
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