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…
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…