David Thomson (born 18 February 1941) is a British film critic and historian based in the United States, and the author of more than 20 books. His reference works in particular — Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th edition, 2014) — have been praised as works of high literary merit and eccentricity despite some criticism for self-indulgence. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, called him "probably the greatest living film critic and historian" who "writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael". John Banville called him "the greatest living writer on the movies" and Michael Ondaatje said he "is our most argumentative and trustworthy historian of the screen." In 2010, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film was named the greatest book on the cinema by a poll in Sight & Sound; his novel Suspects also received multiple votes. Biography Thomson was born in London. He taught film studies at Dartmouth College, and has been a regular contributor to The New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. Thomson has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and scripted an award-winning documentary, The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind. Thomson helped to revive interest in the director Michael Powell (along with Emeric Pressburger, one half of the film duo known as the Archers.) Roger Ebert writes that "Powell was rescued from obscurity and relative poverty first by the film critic David Thomson, whose Biographical Dictionary of Film contained a glowing entry about the director. Powell wrote thanking Thomson, who invited him to teach at Dartmouth College. The trip to America led to Powell's meeting Martin Scorsese, a devotee of the Archers films since he was eleven or twelve years old, and Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who eventually became Powell's wife." Thomson has written several biographies, notably Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. In 1985 he published Suspects, a metafictional novel that imagines the secret histories of film noir characters like Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond and Chinatown'''s Noah Cross. Charles Champlin, in the Los Angels Times, called Suspects "the wildest and most imaginative use of the movies as material I have ever read." Graham Fuller named it one of his favorite books on film, saying "Thomson was a historian writing like a novelist and so