M urder, mortality, isolation, creativity. The veteran critic tackles the biggies in his highly readable but scattershot latest, veering from the appealingly quizzical to the rambling and faintly dismissive. In dissecting homicide’s screen allure, Thomson’s erudite insight dazzles. But unchallenged assumptions about real-world implications of our attraction to movie murder are oddly loose: also, his lament for the loss of Kevin Spacey’s career needed more unpacking. Kevin Harley