News Summary

• Longtime critic David Thomson takes a far warier approach than previously to a medium he has adored in print and in private for seven decades.
• The ultimate problem with movies, Thomson argues, is not simply that they divert us from the real world, but that they want to replace it entirely.
• “Fantasy fills all the available space.
• And when fantasy overwhelms law and politics, it leaves only the bitter energy of disappointed dreaming.
• That is our violence.
• And all we have left?”