Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts

[Thomson is] one of the finest film    critics in the English language.--philip lopate the new york times book review . If most film critics write about movies David Thomson creates their literary counterpart with essays that are as dazzling haunting and moving as the pictures they discuss. In this bravura new collection the Esquire columnist trains his eye on Hollywoods ghosts exploring their tendency to rise from the grave or descend from the screen to intimately haunt our lives.. Thomson conjures up Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and Cary Grant in any of the pictures where he makes every scene look like a lucky accident. With equal aplomb he imagines a James Dean who survived the car crash and a post-Saturday Night Fever Tony Manero. We learn the 20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood (Number 3: You Are Their Playthings Not the Other Way Around). And on every page of Beneath Mulholland we are educated entertained and enlarged by a book as savvy and incisive as any Hollywood reportage and as lyrical as the best fiction.. Not just...one of our sharpest writers-on-film but...one of our wisest and best writers period.   --film comment