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Outstanding
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Booklist Jack Helbig
This is history seen through the lens of the movies and movie criticism undergirded with thoughtful research and scholarly reflection. [15 Nov 2004, p.543]
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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Andrew Johnston
Thomson's engrossing book blows the dust off forgotten scandals (the mysterious death of Jean Harlow's probably gay husband) and offers vivid examples of money's toxifying power, proving over and over that some things never change.
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Outstanding
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Wall Street Journal Stefan Kanfer
Thomson unreels the history of film in a series of flashes forward and back, budgets are broken down, boardrooms are spied upon, scripts and personalities pass before us in fascinating and unprecedented review.
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Outstanding
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Sydney Morning Herald Peter Galvin
Compelling, frequently brilliant, eccentric.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Tom Shone
As a work of history The Whole Equation is idiosyncratic, imperious, infuriating, full of lovely writing, and just a little bit mad; but then a bumpy ride is what you get when you ask a unicorn to pull a cart.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
What Mr. Thomson does most powerfully in this volume is conjure the magic of movies - what Jean-Paul Sartre once called "the frenzy on the wall."
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Favorable
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Library Journal Roy Liebman
Although the book starts naturally enough with Charlie Chaplin, it is largely nonlinear, which tends to add to the narrative's richness, as do Thomson's frequent perceptive and cogent analyses. [15 Nov 2004, p.63]
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
This fascinating, sometimes frustrating love letter to Hollywood doesn't shirk from exposing the blemishes on Thomson's inamorata.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle John McMurtrie
Thomson offers a number of arguments that are powerful enough to make the reader view the movies in a new light.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Robin Wood
The history is fascinating, the critical judgments often conventional, occasionally eccentric, and seldom argued or supported.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Anthony Quinn
David Thomson remains a cherishable contrarian and a wonderful writer, but this rambling tome might convince you that he is best taken in smaller doses.
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Mixed
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The Independent Sean French
In his history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation, he is really for the first time more interested in the movie process, the technology, the audiences, the meaning, the private lives of the stars, than the films themselves.
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Mixed
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Paula Marantz Cohen
In the end, The Whole Equation is not without illuminating moments. But those who are interested in the history of Hollywood will probably know much of what it contains in more depth already, and those who don't may not have enough patience for the author's fulsome, often opaque, style. [15 Jul 2005]
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post John Anderson
If there were no losers there, there would be no history. Since those who make films and those who watch them all seem to be losers in the eyes of David Thomson, he's got an awful lot of history to cover.
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Unfavorable
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The Nation Lee Siegel
The Whole Equation purports to offer a history of Hollywood, but this little epic of a big American business seems to consist mostly of random thoughts jotted down on cocktail napkins at Spago.
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Unfavorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
The Whole Equation's ostensible subject seems like little more than marketing spin for a rambling, frustrating, wildly digressive collection of uneven jottings loosely related to American movies.
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Unfavorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Disappointing, except for some flashes in selected short subjects.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Richard Schickel
In the end, despite its many stylistic felicities and provocative theories, The Whole Equation is movie history for people who don't much like movies.
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