Reviews

"A marvelous bombshell of a book, by one of our most formidably knowledgeable and insightful writers on film, it is filled with surprises and witty asides. Though Thomson is quick to pounce on the hypocrisies and historical omissions of some of these war movies, there is nothing compromised about his own daredevil judgments. We are in the hands of a master critic/essayist." — Phillip Lopate

“Praise the gods for giving us a writer with a deep moral sense and an epigrammatic prose style who writes as exquisitely about war as he does about film. Thomson's book brims with striking observations and provocative readings of crucial films, the great and the forgotten, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Apocalypse Now to Black Hawk Down and scores more. The Fatal Alliance is an absorbing, uproarious and essential book -- about war, about film, about us. And my God, the man can write!"  — Mark Danner, author of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War and Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War