Buck Henry left us this week. He was a person of considerable accomplishment, as detailed in a fine New York Times obituary and this terrific long form overview/interview, but for all of us at Mid Century Cinema, he will be remembered as an essential participant in the New Hollywood—and an exemplar of its ethos. This…
And once again it is that time of year – the season of “best of” lists – and our now-three-year tradition is to play along with a selection of our favorite home video releases. A reminder of the ground rules: this is an appreciation of home video releases, not favorite movies, so the list leans…
We conclude our back-fill of best-of lists here with a review of 1968. To review our bucket-load of qualifications regarding the folly of such lists, please see our discussions of 1967 and 1969. Reviewing those entries ourselves, we note that although we come to praise the ten films below without reservation (and winnowing down from…
As you may have heard, legendary director Martin Scorsese shared some thoughts about the current crop of blockbuster films based on comic book superheroes. “That’s not cinema,” he stated. “As well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances,” they are more analogous to “theme parks” than any other…
Last night the entire staff here at Mid Century Cinema assembled in the screening room to watch Theo Angelopoulos’ The Weeping Meadow—and with that, we have seen them all. But we were not there simply on account of our completist fetish. Rather, in previous discussions we have described what we want from the movies—something to…
Mid Century Cinema favorite Olivier Assayas is at the New York Film Festival with his latest, Wasp Network, which arrives on heels of last year’s Non Fiction. Despite the efforts of our talented internet liaison, Wasp Network sold out before we could order tickets. But all was not lost, as an additional event was subsequently…
The staff in the mailroom here at Mid Century Cinema received some angry letters in the wake of our recent “Best of 1969” post—from 1967 and 1968. “Why didn’t we get the “best of” treatment?” they complained, in correspondence littered with passages too vitriolic to reprint here. Closing with more than a hint of snark,…
Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 17, 1969. The screenplay (co-written with Mazursky’s regular collaborator Larry Tucker) won top honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics; Quincy Jones did the music and veteran cinematographer…
“My romantic idea is to be part of an American New Wave,” Francis Ford Coppola told an interviewer in 1972, perhaps defensively in the wake of the monumental, mainstream success of The Godfather. And as if to prove the point, his next film would be the beyond-uncompromising New Hollywood masterpiece The Conversation (his price for…
It is very 1969 out there this summer, with anniversaries of touching the moon (that’s a Dylan reference) and the Woodstock Festival, as well as what one friend perfectly described as the “immersive experience” of the time capsule visit to EL-Lay ‘69 that is Quinten Tarantino’s current release. Naturally all this led us to thinking…