It was with eager, enthusiastic anticipation that I approached Get Back, the new eight-hour, three part documentary about the recording sessions which would eventually yield the Beatles posthumous album Let it Be. “New” is not exactly the right word to use here – Peter Jackson’s Get Back is drawn from mountains of spectacularly restored footage,…
There are certain types of movies that we tend to shy away from in the grand screening room at Mid Century Cinema: musicals and martial arts flicks, for example. (I once read something clever that argued persuasively these are essentially the same thing—movies structured largely to support elaborately choreographed fantasy sequences.) We also make every…
Bob Dylan has surfaced with yet another installment – Volume 16!! – of The Bootleg Series, his spectacular alternate-universe of unreleased material, which, collectively, reflects a body of work that on its own would stand as one of the most important oeuvres in the history of rock. This entry, dubbed “Springtime in New York,” covers…
A recent memo from Mid Century Cinema’s in-house archivist called attention to the fact that there are a slew of new items and updates on the site, many of which might have easily escaped the attention of even dedicated subscribers. Some of these should be familiar to regular readers—in particular, recent appreciations of Karen Black…
Of all the things I learned during what better heeled writers refer to as “book leave” – that is, some time away from the regular beat so that the magnum opus might be attended to – was that Karen Black has a new album out. This was surprising, for a number of reasons, not least…
We’ve been overwhelmed with the day job this summer here at Mid Century Cinema, and as a result have fallen well behind schedule (stay tuned to this channel for the forthcoming “Karen Black: The New Hollywood Years”!) Nevertheless, given our legions of loyal followers and the high subscription fees they cheerfully endure, to fill the…
As is now long-standing tradition, every summer Mid Century Cinema surfaces with a “Fifty Years Ago” Top 10 list. (As always, please refer to the Wally and Andre rules about the ridiculousness of such exercises.) This season brings us to 1971, an outstanding year for the movies and one of the high water marks of…
Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said, had its premiere in New York City on June 13, 1971. It is not a great film—as Roger Ebert put it in his spot-on if slightly generous review, it is a “disorganized but occasionally brilliant movie.” But it remains worth watching, both for its own noteworthy merits, and…
Bob Dylan has just turned eighty! (And he’s still going strong—we heartily recommend Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in 2020.) One of the singular and seminal performing artists of the postwar era, we have devoted a good bit of attention to him here at Mid Century Cinema, including our enumeration of the “Dylan Rules” and…
Midnight Cowboy (1969) is one of the landmark achievements of the New Hollywood. As we wrote in an earlier consideration, the movie is “an exemplar of what the seventies film aspired to be: focusing on characters [that] the Old Hollywood wouldn’t touch, raising questions that were previously unasked, and searching for the truths that might…