The Los Angeles Review of Books published Associate Professor of Journalism Tim Riley’s review of A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History, by film historian David Thomson.
In the review, “Have Moviegoers Been Suckered?” Riley argues that Thomson “returns to his higher perch as a sympathetic yet neurotic 85-year-old thinker whose sentences swell with implication… ‘Is it possible,’ he writes, ‘that the life of spectatorship prepares us for watching anything?’”
However, “Thomson has staked his professional identity on a beautifully written, weakly argued polemic that reads as patrician at best and antique at worst,” Riley concludes.