January 12 1966 was a momentous day in television history, as perennial third-place network ABC unleashed Batman, with the first of 120 episodes that would air during its brief but glorious run. Like Get Smart (which also negotiated an ambitious blend of comedy and drama), Batman straddled the cultural shifts of the mid-1960s, with one…
In a tough week for cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the legendary figures of the New Hollywood, died on January 3. At the age of eighty-five he was still going strong, coming off a very busy 2014 and associated with a number of upcoming projects. Zsigmond, along with fellow countryman and fellow cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, escaped…
The closing days of 1965 saw the release of The Slender Thread, the first feature film directed by Sydney Pollack, who had been scuffing around as a TV actor (and director) for the previous decade. Thread marked the start of an impressive career for Pollack as a movie director (and subsequently as a notable producer…
The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler died on December 27, six weeks shy of his ninety-fourth birthday. Over the course of his long and extraordinary career, which straddled documentary and fiction films, Wexler was probably best known for his incisive photography on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966). Nominated for five academy awards, he…
Producer/Director Martin Ritt’s outstanding The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, based on the John le Carré novel, opened in America on December 16 1965. The liberal-humanist Ritt (who was blacklisted in the 1950s) had a reputation for often wearing his politics on his sleeve, which is not typically a recipe for dramatic intrigue. …
The great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu was born on December 12 1903 and died on the very same day in 1963. One of Mid Century Cinema’s favorites, we celebrate twelve-twelve as Ozu day. A prolific artist of the silent era, Ozu came to the talkies late and reluctantly, and did not live to see old…
A milestone birthday celebration for Fritz Lang, who was born on December 5, 1890. Lang, a child of Vienna, would become one of the great directors of the thriving Weimar cinema that flowered in Germany during those tumultuous years between the end of the First World War and the Nazi seizure of power. Best known…
Finally, the fifth and last list of favorites—twenty-five films from the 1980s and 1990s. Again, and as always, it’s important to follow the Rules of the Game, but one reminder I will mention explicitly: only one director per list (and so any other films from that director which would have otherwise found a place on…
A programming alert for followers of Mid Century Cinema: on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (!), I have written an appreciation of the films of Woody Allen for Bright Lights Film Journal, which can be read here. In the spirit of the occasion, below is a list of Allen’s feature films as writer-director, along…
So here they are, my top twenty-five from the seventies, (once again in order of domestic release date by country of origin). Obviously, this was the hardest list of all—looking back, it turns out this decade contributed TEN to my twenty-five greatest of all-time list; as always, those films noted by an asterisk. So the…