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…
We’ve all been there—late at night in a crowded bar, people have had a few to many, a boast is bandied about, and before you know it, a brawl erupts over which was Hitchcock’s greatest decade, the thirties or the forties? (A minority faction fights for the fifties, and that guy dressed in black smoking…
David Thomson is one of the most accomplished and influential writers on cinema over the last half-century. Wedding an impossibly encyclopedic knowledge of film history with a singularly recognizable, assuredly graceful and daringly personal prose style, Thomson was prominent among the grand cohort of critical voices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s—a golden age,…
Greetings all. We’re writing today about some upcoming logistical changes here at Mid Century Cinema. We have to transition from both our web-host and our software template. (Our name, address, and content will remain the same.) During that process, we hope to be able to transfer our list of subscribers (those who receive e-mail notifications…