Tom Shone

• 1. Introduction

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  Tom Shone spent five years as the Sunday Times film critic, from 1994 to 1999, sitting in darkened cinemas and wrestling with questions that most critics of his era were happy to dismiss. What made the summer blockbuster tick? Was it art, commerce, or something stranger? Those questions would eventually produce one of the more distinctive bodies of film writing in recent memory. Shone was educated in the UK, passing through Varndean Sixth Form College in Brighton, Sussex, before building a career that would take his byline to Vogue, Slate, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Guardian. The Sunday Times post was his training ground, but the real work came after he left it.

• 2. Defending the Blockbuster

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  Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer landed in 2004, published by Simon and Schuster, and it made an argument that serious film culture had largely avoided making. Shone traced the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster back to its origins in the 1970s, focusing on the work of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as the driving forces behind a wholesale shift in how studios thought about summer releases. The book drew on interviews with Spielberg, Lucas, and other filmmakers, giving Shone direct access to the people who had built the phenomenon he was analyzing. Where many critics treated the blockbuster as evidence of Hollywood's decline, Shone approached it as a subject worth understanding on its own terms.

• 3. Into Fiction

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  Shone's first novel, In the Rooms, arrived in the UK on the 2nd of July 2009, published by Hutchinson. Two years later, St. Martin's Press brought it to American readers in 2011. The shift from criticism to fiction is a common aspiration among writers who spend years describing other people's stories, but relatively few film critics have made it with a full novel from a major publisher on both sides of the Atlantic.

• 4. Retrospective Studies

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  Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective and Woody Allen: A Retrospective arrived in 2014 and 2015 respectively, placing Shone squarely in the tradition of long-form filmmaker studies. Both books took a career-spanning approach to their subjects, two directors whose bodies of work invite exactly the kind of deep retrospective reading that Shone had been practicing since his Sunday Times years.

• 5. Inside Christopher Nolan

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  The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan appeared in 2020 and was built on a collaboration with the filmmaker himself. Library Journal called it "the definitive word on Nolan and a must for film buffs." The cultural critic Neal Gabler offered a more expansive verdict, describing the book as "intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable" and naming it "the very model of what a filmmaking study should be," adding that it was "essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter." The collaboration model Shone used here, working directly with the subject rather than around him, gave the book a different texture than a standard critical study.