Biography

Film critic formerly with The Guardian, then with the London Evening Standard.

His 2003 book, the autobiographical "Family Secrets", revealed how in 1917 his father shot his mother's lover dead, but was found not guilty of murder, on the grounds that this was a 'crime passionel'. Derek only discovered this by accident at age 16.

His top ten films of all time are: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), Tokyo Story (1953), The Seventh Seal (1957), The Music Room (1958), Touch of Evil (1958), Rio Bravo (1959), Tristana (1970), The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) and Dekalog (1989).

Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford.

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977.

I find critics who have been out in the world a bit and have some broader interests, usually more interesting than reviewers who spent most of their life sitting in the dark completely absorbed by movies and nothing else.

[on Natural Born Killers (1994)] Isn't so much a cry against the dying of the light as the kind of movie that dims the light in the first place.

[on Heaven's Gate (1980)] The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience - an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors hold sway.

[on Dracula (1992)] Remains in essentials a fairly comprehensive and often vulgar mess. The whole somehow seems to sum up perfectly what most people want from cinema nowadays: style hinting at content but gradually drowning it out with pyrotechnics.

[on Ken Loach] He is one of those very few directors who simply holds fast to his principles, right or wrong. And that's that as far as he's concerned. You won't change him so you might as well celebrate what he is.