3 ideas
Film meaning lives in how a performer's face and body hold the camera's attention, not in the story being told. Thomson judges actors by what the camera finds in them across many films, such as stillness, withholding, and the gap between what a character says and what the face reveals. That makes presence, not narrative competence, the unit of film analysis.
Thomson argues that honest criticism means committing to a subjective, even idiosyncratic judgment rather than hiding behind neutral reference-book summary. Each entry ends in a verdict that can be argued with, and the reader learns by disagreeing as much as by agreeing. Declared taste is more useful than false objectivity because it exposes its own reasoning.
The meaning of a director or actor emerges from the pattern across their full body of work, not from any single film. Recurring gestures, obsessions, decline, and late surprises only become visible when the career is read as one continuous arc. A minor film can reveal more than a masterpiece about who the artist really is.