For reasons too complex to easily unpack, the crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema have been catching up with re-runs of Kojak, the mid-70s TV policier. It has been an eye opening experience. There were easily a dozen decent cop shows in the late sixties and early seventies—but in retrospect, it is clear that…
Donald Sutherland, one of the most consistent, sure-handed, and prolific actors of the last sixty years, left us a few weeks ago. One of the signature performers of the New Hollywood era, we were remiss in not previously punching his ticket for admission to the Mid Century Cinema pantheon. In the decade of the 1970s…
It’s that season again—time to revisit the best movies from half a century ago. And 1974 was a great year for the movies. The New Hollywood, which only had two big years left ahead of it, wasn’t just hot, it was incandescent. And it was a also a very strong year for film globally. Confronted…
It is Claude Sautet’s centennial year. A cause for celebration at Mid Century Cinema, but for many it might be an occasion to say, “who is Claude Sautet”? Which would be understandable. Sautet, who died a quarter of a century ago, left us only fourteen films (as writer-director) over a forty year career. And none…
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story by Sam Wasson arrives with enormous promise. Coppola’s story has been told before, but those stories are irresistible, and surely there is room for still more—especially from an experienced, eminently well qualified author who enjoyed virtually unprecedented access to all of the major players, and to…
The hardworking staff at Mid Century Cinema has been engaged with a number of off-site projects recently, including an appreciation of Wim Wenders for the New Left Review, a very exiting feature revisiting Three Days of the Condor for the spring issue of Cineaste, and a long-form take on Bertrand Tavernier’s Guerre sans Nom (The…
As the calendar year comes to a close, it’s time to share our annual Top Ten home video releases. As always, this is not so much a list of our favorite movies newly available in 2023, but rather reflects the “best of home video 2023”—and as such great emphasis is placed on packages that offer valuable…
We have been spending, vicariously, a good bit of time with John le Carré in recent months, and also with David Cornwell (1931 – 2020), the man behind that nom de plume. The latter is the subject of The Pigeon Tunnel, a new film by the accomplished documentarian Errol Morris—the title drawn from le Carré’s…
Robert De Niro turns eighty this week—a milestone that apparently we find more aback-taking than he does; this past April, in his eightieth year, the legendary actor celebrated the birth of his seventh child. Nevertheless, as a first ballot Hall-of-Famer, prominent in the pantheon of the New Hollywood, and one of the great actors of…
It was with considerable enthusiasm that I procured my copy of William Mann’s Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair the day it became available. Although Bogie has been written about more than extensively – efforts that include the magisterial, definitive, must-read Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax…