The crack staff in the procurement department here at Mid Century Cinema managed to secure a copy of Rifkin’s Festival, Woody Allen’s most recent film. And although we tend to shy away from “reviews” at this outfit, since it will likely be some time before North American viewers will have access to this one, an…
For those of you who enjoyed our recent conversation with David Thomson in the Los Angeles Review of Books and found yourself saying, “Gee, if only there was more”—well, there is! We’re very happy with the studio version of our discussion, but there was a ton of footage left on the cutting room floor. What…
George Segal left us last week, and reading through all the tributes that followed we realized that he is scandalously underrepresented in these pages. This oversight is, perhaps, all too common. In drawing up lists of the iconic male actors of the New Hollywood, names like Hackman, Hoffman and Nicholson immediately leap to mind (as…
David Thomson – the author of a number of indispensable books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (a simply essential volume for any movie lover), Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (highly recommended), and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (an extraordinary accomplishment) – has a new book out (as…
Claude Chabrol, one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite directors, is said to have made close to seventy feature films. We’ve only seen fifty-four of them, but very likely our favorite is Just Before Nightfall. One of the great films of the seventies, it premiered in Paris on March 31, 1971. Arriving midway in a period…
Claude Sautet is not a household name. The French auteur, who left us in 2000, was not a prolific filmmaker. (The writer-director of fourteen features, he had a hand in the screenplay of a number of others, including the cult favorite Eyes Without a Face.) Nor did he leave behind a particular film that is…
In 1950 the legendary studio Svensk Filmindustri released This Can’t Happen Here, a would-be Cold War spy thriller directed by Ingmar Bergman. Legend would hold that the film, largely unseen, was marred by a clumsy, even embarrassing anti-communist perspective—in the vein of some of the schlock being produced in America at the same time, as…
What’s new at Mid Century Cinema? Everything! It’s a brand new day for America—and it’s also, quite coincidentally, something of a re-launch for us, as you can see by surfing around our updated and upgraded site: https://midcenturycinema.org/. In addition to a spiffy new and improved design (courtesy of our multi-talented new webmaster), the biggest change in these…
This is the time of year we play the “best of” game, here with a top ten of our favorite home video releases of 2020. What’s that you say? All video in 2020 is home video? Well, yes, but we’re limiting ourselves to what was released on DVD and/or Blu Ray. And, as always, recall…
Puzzle of a Downfall Child, the first film by Jerry Schatzberg (he would go on to direct notable New Hollywood entries The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow), has taken a long and circuitous path towards its current status as “significant second tier seventies film worth a look.” Released on December 16 1970, it was greeted…