Kevin Thomas was born in Los Angeles in 1936. He earned a BA at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and an MA in English Literature form Penn State.

Thomas comes from a multi-generation newspaper family. With film reviews in the Los Angeles Times starting in 1962, he is the longest running movie reviewer for the same daily paper in the history of American journalism, according to The Complete History of American Film Criticism. From 1984 to 2005, Thomas wrote a column in the Times called "Screening Room" that covered independent, alternative and foreign film. That column helped expose screenings of underground and avant-garde cinema to a wider audience in the Los Angeles area.