David Thomson--Falling In and Out of Love with the Movies

The critic David Thomson is so alert to the seductions and subterfuges of film it's hard to imagine he was ever a sucker for cinema. Of course, we were all young and innocent once. Now he's uneasily aware of what movie-watching entails: the voyeurism, the passivity, and the ideologies concealed in images, characters and plots . He charts his – and our – increasingly distanced relationship with film in his latest book, "The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies." David and I talked about how moviegoing has changed over the decades, what the medium has done to us, and our new infatuation with other, smaller screens. Along the way we discussed immigrant filmmakers and American mythmaking, Citizen Kane, California light and Germanic shadow, film noir, masculinity and movies, Hitchcock and Tarantino.