Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: From Don Corleone to Donald Trump: David Thomson puts the movies on trial

PICK OF THE WEEK

A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson (Allen Lane)

For cinephiles, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson – first published in 1975, now in its sixth edition – is the indispensable guide to the movies, treasured for the erudition, humour and unashamedly opinionated character of its 1,500 pen portraits. Thomson’s other essential books include a biography of Orson Welles, a history of disaster and apocalypse on film, an exploration of binge television, and the brilliant Suspects (1985), a novel which imagines the intertwined histories of legendary movie characters.

Aged 85, he has now delivered a tract which dares to call into question the vocation to which he has devoted his life. Like Virgil demanding that the Aeneid be burned, or Monet destroying his own canvases, he proposes that the very movies he has written about with such distinction may have bred in us a fatal complicity and passivity that are the cultural underpinnings of the political and social predicament in which we now find ourselves.

“Identity and integrity are in jeopardy,” he says. “The movies were just a flash in the pan. Fool’s gold.” Then: “How could education, literacy, law, and a verbal culture accommodate the widespread and instantaneous delivery of the lifelike?” And: “we have to consider how far the thrill of cinema and its stupid neutrality have made us helpless.”

Harsh? Take The Godfather (1972), which Thomson readily hails as a “majestic achievement”. But he then interrogates that orthodoxy with ruthless candour. “The film has worked for over fifty years because its violence and revenge seem healing and understanding; and because every execution is shot and cut like a perfect dream task.”

Followed by the knock-out punch: “if you are ever in the film world (or finance, the law, the media), notice or try not to notice how many of its guys imitate or seem impressed by the look, the attitudes, and the lines of the Corleone family.” Touché.

Of Pretty Woman (1990), and its Cinderella version of sex work, he says: “It’s a disgrace… We should not sit still for it.” The Hannibal Lecter movies epitomise how “this medium has begun to diminish our nature”. As for David Fincher’s Seven (1995): “I watch it too often for my own good.”

In the first season of True Detective, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) famously says that “like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.” The monster at the end of Thomson’s tale is Donald Trump, the “sweaty houseboy” of Elon Musk and all the tech plutocrats who have supplanted the studio kingpins of the past.

All roads lead, in Thomson’s account, not to Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu or even Disneyland but to the vulgarian nightmare of Mar-a-Lago: “It was part of the degraded system, the surrendered idea of education and moral purpose, the sheep that had voted for him twice… he is a jerk and a genius and a lowlife whose only escape from his dank cave is in being on camera”

Worst of all: “It could have been anyone, because all the conditions for our hell were in place.” We cannot even take comfort in laying all the blame at the president’s gold-leafed door.

As an intellectual thought experiment and an exercise in radical self-scrutiny, the book is utterly compelling. Yet, in an irony of which I suspect he is all too aware, Thomson subverts his own subversion. He loves screwball comedies, especially (and correctly) Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941). He loves Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965). He loves the movies of Michael Haneke, Jonathan Glazer, Joachim Trier and many others.

Even as he questions the passion that has defined his life, he reaffirms it – and infectiously so. A Sudden Flicker of Light (the title is drawn from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady) is a true page-turner which made me scribble down a long list of films I wanted to watch again: already, I’ve revisited Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), and Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), with plenty more to come. Much like Thomson’s writings, these and hundreds of other classic movies will still be relished when Trump is just a bad memory.

AUDIOBOOK

The Odyssey by Homer, in the voice of Sir Michael Caine

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In 2024, I was lucky enough to collaborate with Sir Michael Caine on a collection of interviews – Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over (Hodder & Stoughton) – and was struck by the great actor’s future-facing enthusiasm for technology.

“Machines and robots,” he told me, “are only as bad as the people programming them, and that should be our focus. They are what we make of them, that’s all.” He added: “I think all this will settle down as we figure out how to make it work for us, rather than the other way round.”

In exactly that spirit, the double Oscar winner (along with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey) is leading the field in licensing the rights to his voice. And quite right, too: why should others make use of and profit unfairly from its unmistakable sound? I hope all his fellow actors and artists follow this example and assert control over their work and creativity.

So now we can enjoy the full text of Homer’s Odyssey, with orchestral music, read by an AI-generated Michael Caine that sounds uncannily like the man himself. The translation used is the stately 1871 version of William Cullen Bryant – and the beautifully produced narration, across 13 hours, is an ideal preparation for the release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s epic IMAX movie.

Which is pleasingly symmetrical: the two knights have made eight movies together. Nolan has called Caine his “lucky charm” – and here, yet again, is another auspicious omen from the gods.

STREAMING

Lucky

Apple TV, July 15

“Beat the room. Trust no one. And no short cuts”: these are the rules of the game that conman John Armstrong (Timothy Olyphant) has taught his daughter Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy, terrific). Now she and her husband Cary (Drew Starkey) are in Las Vegas with $10m of stolen cash, finalising their clandestine getaway on a cargo plane.

“Everything is going to plan,” he says. “Until it isn’t,” she replies – presciently, of course. FBI agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is closing in on the would-be Bonnie and Clyde (and you know what happened to them), as is Drew’s mobster mother, Priscilla (Annette Bening).

At the apex of the criminal pyramid is the green-haired Whittaker (William Fichtner), a study in amorality and coiled violence. Utterly indifferent to the human cost of what he does, he just wants his money back and the thieves held to account. In their scenes together, Bening is as good as you would expect: lethal as Priscilla undoubtedly is, she knows that Whittaker is in a different category of psychosis and behaves accordingly around him.

Based on Marissa Stapley’s best-selling 2021 thriller, Lucky is a superior heist-and-chase drama that keeps up the pace, the banter and the needle drops across seven episodes. “Lucky, you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison,” says Rand. But has she really run out of cards?

FILM

Taxi Driver

Selected cinemas

Every time I watch Martin Scorsese’s classic – re-released in vivid 4K to mark its 50^th anniversary – a different moment stops me in my tracks. On this occasion, it was Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), in voiceover, defining himself by his pathological isolation.

“Loneliness has followed me my whole life,” he says. “Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” The last three words were screenplay writer Paul Schrader’s homage to Thomas Wolfe, drawn from an eponymous essay published posthumously in 1941, in which Wolfe called loneliness “the central and inevitable fact of human existence” and “a kind of hideous weather of the soul.” (Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was another important literary inspiration for Schrader).

More than 30 years before the juggernaut of social media smashed its way into the global psyche, Travis, a disturbed Vietnam veteran seeking long hours of distraction as a New York cabbie, is a dangerously atomised figure, a man without human connection but obsessively driven, without logic or morality, to seek purpose in his life.

First, he woos Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), who is working on the presidential campaign of Senator Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). When he fails in that endeavour, he tries to save 12-year-old Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel, stomach-turning). Though he imagines otherwise, there is no nobility or chivalry to either mission; only an unhinged longing to exact an ill-defined vengeance from an urban Inferno that he identifies with absolute corruption.

De Niro, who had just won his first Oscar, for The Godfather Part II, is terrifying in his portrayal of compressed mania. Nothing about Travis is integrated or aligned. On their first and only date, he takes Betsy to a porn movie. Yet, when Iris suggests that he join her at a commune in Vermont, his response is starchy and prim.

“I saw some pictures once in a magazine – didn’t look very clean,” he says. “I don’t go to places like that.” He is a racist psychopath yet considers himself an upstanding citizen.

As Scorsese has put it, the film “arose from my feeling that movies are a kind of dream-state” and its nightmarish aesthetic owes much to Bernard Herrmann’s unforgettable score, the last he ever wrote (the first was for Citizen Kane). In spite of the strong opposition of jury president Tennessee Williams, the movie won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Though deeply rooted in the squalor of 1970s New York, Taxi Driver has slipped the moorings of time to become a vision of everyday apocalypse that feels more uncomfortably contemporary than ever: you only have to scroll on your phone to see that, in 2026, God’s lonely men are everywhere.