Fat City, the film that marked the beginning of John Huston’s remarkable late career resurgence, premiered at the Cannes film festival on May 12, 1972. The legendary filmmaker, then sixty-six and coming off several uninspired efforts and an even longer stretch since he’d really had something to say, might have easily shuffled quietly into his…
Once a decade, the British film Journal Sight and Sound produces its “Greatest Films of All Time” list, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 critics, programmers, distributors and film scholars. Last time around, in 2012, there was some excitement as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo unseated the perennial “this is officially the greatest movie of all…
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is now Fifty Years Old—which is two years older than Marlon Brando was when he portrayed Don Corleone in the movie. It is, inarguably, a great film, even something of a landmark, now adorned with all the requisite ribbons of coveted official approval. (It checks in at twenty-one on the…
When last we discussed Alfred Hitchcock, it was to celebrate the movies he made in the 1940s, in support of the contention that it was his finest decade. The stakes of course could not have been higher, and this also outed us as choosing sides in that most sensitive of topics – one that somehow…
A Hero, the new movie from Asghar Farhadi, is now in general release and we saw it the first day that the evil empire made it available for streaming. We had been eagerly awaiting this opportunity for some time: the film won the Grand Prize at Cannes, has been showered with rave reviews, and, most…
It’s January out there, which means that many with a melancholy streak tend to note, with some existential ennui, the implications of the calendar’s turning page. (Pink Floyd’s “Time” offers the definitive expression of such sentiments, but that’s so gloomy we won’t even provide a link—here’s a little Dougie MacLean instead.) For cinephiles, however, passage…
Tis the season . . . for movie lists! We celebrate this at Mid Century Cinema with our annual Top Ten Home Video releases. Do keep in mind, as always, that this is not so much a list favorite movies newly available in 2021, but rather reflects the “best of home video 2021”—and so it…
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…