The Storms of Jeremy Thomas

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, about the career of one of the most important film producers of the last 50 years, is one of Cousins' best and most entrancing films.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.

With Cousins’ wry thoughts on the films and some reflection of the meaning of it all, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas provides a colorful and entertaining canvas for some beautiful and beautifully set-up movie clips — you want to rush out and watch all of them again.

More discursive than comprehensive, the film does seem to capture Thomas’ fierce, swashbuckling spirit.

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas persuasively makes the case for closer scrutiny of a producer’s career, though it leaves viewers with some homework to do.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

The whole effort comes across more as an advertisement for Thomas’s genius — and Cousins’s obsession with him — than a true portrait of a discerning producer of outsider cinema.