Why this lender recommends it

"This is not the kind of book you finish. You keep it near the TV or your favoured video device (when I was a kid this position was occupied by Halliwell's). It's David Thomson and I love David Thomson. A grumpy humanist who loves films that honour ordinary as well as extraordinary lives. The book is heavy on the French directors of the popular front and afterwards - Thomson opens the book with a quote from Robert Bresson, which is a good thing (also Sartre, so you'll get a sense of where he's coming from). But every genre is here, with no snobbery, ever. Each film gets a page or so and there are some lovely, fascinating inclusions and some very surprising exclusions. The introduction is a mini-history of the form and worth a read on its own." - Reviewer on Goodreads.com