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David Robinson (born 6 August 1930 in Lincoln, Lincolnshire) is a British film critic and author. He started writing for Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin in the 1950s, becoming Assistant Editor of Sight and Sound and Editor of the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1957-1958. He was film critic of The Financial Times from 1958 to 1973, before taking up the same post at The Times in 1973. He remained the paper's main film reviewer until around 1990 and a regular contributor until around 1996.

His books include Hollywood in the Twenties (1968) and World Cinema (1973), but he is probably best-known as the official biographer of Charlie Chaplin. His Life and Art, first published in 1985, and revised for subsequent editions in 1992 and 2001, is regarded as the definitive book on the subject, and Robinson has become a sort of unofficial spokesman for Chaplin in the media in recent years. He has also written a book on Buster Keaton. He wrote a long book called "The History of World Cinema" (1973), expanded and revised as "World Cinema: A Short History" ("World Cinema 1895-1980" on the cover) (1981).

In 1973, he was the head of the jury at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival. He is the Director of Le Giornate del cinema muto (http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/) the silent film festival in Pordenone, which takes place in northern Italy every October.

Robinson played a significant part in the creation of the award winning Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank which opened in 1988 and closed in 1999.

For the centenary of cinema in 1995, Robinson wrote The Chronicle of Cinema 1895-1995, a 127-page introduction to film history. This was serialised in the form of five supplementary magazines accompanying Sight and Sound from September 1994 to January 1995.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "David Robinson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0