Selected by David Denby | The New Yorker

“I first saw Graham Greene and Sir Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN when I was a teenager, and, apart from its dazzling light, its heavy shadows (which, unlike most shadows, move), its atmosphere of magnificent squalor (post-war Vienna), the movie has most vividly remained in my mind as bringer of truth about adulthood: Life was not orderly, but chaotic, sordid, and dangerous; moral virtue, even courage, might count for very little; the good guy (Joseph Cotten) did not get the girl—the evil guy (Orson Welles), who makes things happen, gets the girl. It is still my favorite movie despite many, many viewings.” – D.B.

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998. His first article for the magazine, “Does Homer Have Legs?,” published in 1993, grew into a book, “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World,” about reading the literary canon at Columbia University. His other subjects for the magazine have included the Scottish Enlightenment, the writers Susan Sontag and James Agee, and the movie directors Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, and the Coen brothers. In 1991, he received a National Magazine Award for three of his articles, on high-end audio. Before joining The New Yorker, he was the film critic at New York for twenty years; his writing has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. He is the editor of “Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present,” and the author, additionally, of “American Sucker,” “Snark,” and a collection of his film criticism from the magazine, “Do the Movies Have a Future?” He is currently working on a book about high-school reading, a kind of prequel to “Great Books.”