David Thomson is fully vaxxed and relaxed ashe settles into his armchair a few feet from his cluttered office desk.As the morning light pours in from a bay window in his Fillmore district house, he motions a visitor to a nearby chair.

他一如既往地谈论电影。

At 80, the British-born Thomson, who has called San Francisco home for decades, is as mesmerized by cinema as he was as an 8-year-old in London watching Howard Hawks’ classicWestern “Red River.”But he’s worried about the future of movies.An enthusiastic streamer, he thinks long-form television might surpass the traditional feature film in an ever-changing culture.

“We’re at an extraordinary junction where we’re going to have to redefine what human nature is,” Thomson said.“And cinema, which was such a sensational thing for, let’s say a hundred years – it’s possible it just might fade away.

“I feel lucky to have been there for those hundredyears,” he added, laughing.“Or almost!”

Widely called the greatest living film critic and historian, and author of the indispensable“The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,”Thomson ruminates on the movies’ past, present and future in his latest book, “A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors. “

There are chapters on past masters who hebelieves changed the way movies were made, including Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard,Orson Welles,Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, his beloved Hawks.

“‘Red River,’ in some sweet map of the mind, flows into Renoir’s rivers and all the fluent passages of cinema,” he writes in the book.“Getting from the Rio Grande to Abilene, Kansas, was about eight hundredmiles — if you care to measure it — or it was somewhere between two hours and the rest of your life. “

These days, Thomson finds Hawks’ rollicking comedy “His Girl Friday” and other gentle classic films of the era – particularly his current favorite, Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner” – to be his comfort food.

“I find American comedies of a certain era to be my favorite films,” Thomson said.“‘Shop Around the Corner’ is a model for a certain kind of light romance that actually goes quite deep. What it says about how and why people fall in love and how they’re attracted is quite profound.”

But he is also struck by a promising new era of women making movies(“A Female Gaze” is a chapter in the book), filmmakers of color and the long-form series that appear to be the future.He once wrote a book on“Breaking Bad,”still his favorite series, but also enthuses about Netflix’s “Babylon Berlin” and“Halston”(“Ewan McGregor gives a fantastic performance,” he said), Amazon Prime’s“Fleabag”(” an amazingly important work “) and many others.

But he also worries about the art form in the days of cancel culture.Thomson is happy that we are making cultural progress, but he also points out that life is pretty messy.Films are about conflict and reckoning with our desires.

Take the surrealist Buñuel, whose work Thomson fears cannot be taught in this era.“Belle de Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve, opens with an elaborate rape fantasy.

“I don’t think you could show ‘Belle du Jour’ if it was a new film,” Thomson said.“This is a huge issue because for me, someone of my age, there were crucial years — teenage years, 20s — when a very, very big reason why we went to the movies and got such a kick out of them was the relationship between their sexual suggestiveness and our fantasies. It had a lot to do with how we developed emotionally. And without question, that was founded on a way of looking at women that objectified them, that limited their opportunities, and it was a part of a male supremacy.

“For very good reasons, those things are very hard now. The reformist attitude for how we think and behave is vital. But it’s eating away at the base excitement in films. … Desire, which can take incredible forms, many of which you might not want to talk about directly — desire is vital. “

Some quick takes from Thomson’s book: “Easy Rider” is “godawful crap and pretension”;Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” not considered one of his best works, is a “neglected gem” in which his favorite actor, Cary Grant, is “a charming, unstable risk factor”;his reaction to Quentin Tarantino’s“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”is, “What a lark! What a wow! What a disgrace”;and“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,”made in 2014 by San Francisco State alum Ana Lily Amirpour for $50,000, is “cruel, comic, lovely … it cries out with inspiration and daring.”

And there’s more to come.Thomsonis working what would be around his 40th book, which he said will be about the craft of movie acting.

“I don’t believe in retirement — it’s not for me. I’m busy, as you can see from this room,” Thomson said, gesturing toward the messy desk.“In the most fatuous, silly, romantic way, I still feel I’m a young man.”

“A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors”
By David Thomson
(Knopf; 304 pages; $ 28)

Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present David Thomson:A live stream conversation with GeoffDyer on crowdcast.10 am PST Thursday, May 27. Free with registration.booksandbooks.com