BOOK

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Updated and Expanded (Knopf, $40). There’s still no room for Whit Stillman or Parker Posey in the newly revised fifth edition of the most idiosyncratically interesting of all books about movies, which says much about the author’s increasingly quaint big-is-best perspective: David Thomson continues to believe that Hollywood has the power to make America a better place, and fears that it is no longer fulfilling its culture-shaping potential. Fortunately, you can easily ignore that aspect of the book and concentrate instead on its crisp, wholly personal, and unfailingly illuminating appraisals of everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Orson Welles. Thomson may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t make him predictable, much less irrelevant (TT).