Murder and the Movies

3.5 stars This book, Murder and the Movies, by British film critic and historian David Thomson, might be considered "a panorama of mayhem, a miscellany of malice." Film critic and historian David Thomson Thomson writes about the ubiquitous depiction of death and murder in the media, especially films,......more

DNF I could not get through this book. One tedious long sentence jumping between endless movies and topics. The premise sounded so good. I love watching movies and also the movies from older decades interest me, and I've always enjoyed crime and thrillers and murder is often part of that. I was looki......more

Murder is such an enticing topic. We all know it's wrong, we all definitely agree it should be illegal. And yet we cannot get away from the fact that we're obsessed by it, by the fact that all of us could, technically, kill someone. It is the obsession that fuels countless documentaries, books, and......more

If you've read David Thomson's novels Silver Light and Suspects, you're familiar with how he plays with movie history. He mixes the characters in films with the actors who play them. For Thomson the history of Hollywood is no more or less true than the stories on the screen. In this book Thomson asks......more

Well written. Food for thought. The question is how many murders have we seen? Thomson guesstimates it could be 150,000 for the average adult movie watcher. Does the fact that we have seen so many murders inure us to everyday violence? Is this part of the reason we have so many mass shootings? Too m......more