How To Watch a Movie

If anyone is qualified to guide readers in how to watch a movie, it is veteran film critic Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film; Have You Seen…??). For the author, movie watching is not a passive entertainment, though he is admittedly massively entertained by film, but an elegant exercise in paying attention and awareness. To watch a movie is to see it more than once. With a prose style more conversational than didactic, Thomson dissects how the technical vocabulary of filmmaking, such as the frame, shot, cut, and sound, is used to re-create the human experience on screen. Part film interpretation, part psychology, this volume explores how the experience of watching artifice on celluloid film, digital print, or LCD screen arouses real-life emotions. Thomson supports his thesis with penetrating analysis of some of the usual suspects—Citizen Kane, Rebel Without a Cause, and several Alfred Hitchcock classics—as well as some deep cuts and recent releases.