The public relations department here at Mid Century Cinema is delighted to announce that When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, will be published by Cornell University Press this June. It features a veritable dream team of contributors (you can click on the links below for author IDs). From the Jacket Copy: In When…
We’re still ruminating on the question of great directors and the distinct (and distinguished) attribute of voice, following our recent discussion here that put forth a preliminary working-list-in-progress of twenty-nine directors canonized on this score. Any such list is arbitrary (that is, to some extent influenced by taste), fluid (cue Andre and Wally on this…
Thanks to the internet (which has likely destroyed enlightened civilization but admittedly has its upside), we have at long last been able to screen the one film by Krzysztof Kieslowski that had previously eluded us. (Our post from 2017, Kieslowski for Completists, has been updated accordingly.) Finally seeing the very fine and very representative Life…
Once again the crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema is getting ready to teach “The Politics of the Seventies Film,” (new bat time, new bat channel). Long time listeners will recall that we’ve followed along with the class in previous incarnations, with posts under the headings of “A Semester of Seventies Films” and then…
It’s that time of year – the season of “best of” lists – and our now-emerging tradition is to play along with a selection of our favorite home video releases. A reminder of the ground rules: this is an appreciation of favorite home video releases, not favorite movies, so there is an emphasis on discs…
Days apart in the last week of November, filmmakers Nicholas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci left us. The turn–the-page pairing of two representative-of-something artists sounded echoes of July 1997, when Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart died on the first and the second of the month—quite the “they don’t make them like that anymore” farewell to the…
So, we don’t really write negative reviews here at Mid Century Cinema, for two reasons. First, we’re not in the review game. In fact, we’re a little wary of that enterprise, in which creative people work long and hard to produce something they value, and then someone else wanders by and passes summary judgement on…
On a number of occasions here we have invoked something we dubbed the “three screenings rule”—that it is hard to fully come to grips with a movie until you have seen it three times. Thus although we will often, even with great enthusiasm, share a few words about a movie seen only once, we nevertheless…
MCC favorite Olivier Assayas has a new film out—the French title is Doubles Vies (Double Lives). We were not able to see it at the New York Film Festival (especially sorry to have missed the Q&A that followed there), but thanks to the new branch office we did catch the screening arranged by the Boston…
Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen, premiered on October 17, 1968. A much beloved film that invariably brings a smile to the face of its enthusiasts—mostly for its legendary car chase. It lasts over ten minutes! Steve McQueen did much of his own dangerous high-speed driving! That streets-of-San-Francisco sequence (the big hills…