As you may have heard, legendary director Martin Scorsese shared some thoughts about the current crop of blockbuster films based on comic book superheroes. “That’s not cinema,” he stated. “As well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances,” they are more analogous to “theme parks” than any other…
Last night the entire staff here at Mid Century Cinema assembled in the screening room to watch Theo Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow—and with that, we have seen them all. But we were not there simply on account of our completist fetish. Rather, in previous discussions we have described what we want from the movies—something to…
Mid Century Cinema favorite Olivier Assayas is at the New York Film Festival with his latest, Wasp Network, which arrives on heels of last year’s Non Fiction. Despite the efforts of our talented internet liaison, Wasp Network sold out before we could order tickets. But all was not lost, as an additional event was subsequently…
The staff in the mailroom here at Mid Century Cinema received some angry letters in the wake of our recent “Best of 1969” post—from 1967 and 1968. “Why didn’t we get the “best of” treatment?” they complained, in correspondence littered with passages too vitriolic to reprint here. Closing with more than a hint of snark,…
Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 17, 1969. The screenplay (co-written with Mazursky’s regular collaborator Larry Tucker) won top honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics; Quincy Jones did the music and veteran cinematographer…
“My romantic idea is to be part of an American New Wave,” Francis Ford Coppola told an interviewer in 1972, perhaps defensively in the wake of the monumental, mainstream success of The Godfather. And as if to prove the point, his next film would be the beyond-uncompromising New Hollywood masterpiece The Conversation (his price for…
It is very 1969 out there this summer, with anniversaries of touching the moon (that’s a Dylan reference) and the Woodstock Festival, as well as what one friend perfectly described as the “immersive experience” of the time capsule visit to EL-Lay ‘69 that is Quinten Tarantino’s current release. Naturally all this led us to thinking…
We have always had a soft spot for North Dallas Forty, which opened on August 3, 1979. So as it hits middle age, a brief appreciation here—not to make the case for the movie as an overlooked masterpiece or something, but as a really fine (and entertaining) film worth taking seriously. Outwardly a raucous sports…
As many of our general readers know, we are somewhat wary of the internet here at Mid Century Cinema—seeing as how it has contributed to the end of civilization and all that. Nevertheless, here we are, and splashing around the shallow end of the social media pool one lazy summer day introduced us to the…
It has been twenty years since the release of Eyes Wide Shut, the final film of Stanley Kubrick, one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite directors. Based on a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, Kubrick transposed the story from turn-of-the-century Vienna to contemporary New York City—but with the exception of adding the pivotal character Victor Ziegler…