A programming alert for followers of Mid Century Cinema: on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (!), I have written an appreciation of the films of Woody Allen for Bright Lights Film Journal, which can be read here. In the spirit of the occasion, below is a list of Allen’s feature films as writer-director, along…
So here they are, my top twenty-five from the seventies, (once again in order of domestic release date by country of origin). Obviously, this was the hardest list of all—looking back, it turns out this decade contributed TEN to my twenty-five greatest of all-time list; as always, those films noted by an asterisk. So the…
Wow. There must be something in the air. Here at Mid Century Cinema we’re been compiling our “best of” lists, and just by coincidence – we assume – those invaluable folks at the Criterion Collection have put up a link to this French website which has posted a slew of “top 50s” from notable directors….
Forging ahead with the “best of” lists . . . and this is getting harder. Last week we went with twenty-five favorites from the 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s featured what Phillip Lopate dubbed “the heroic age of movie going” (especially for foreign films), the ambitious American films that pressed hard against the weakening resistance…
Making lists is like watching movies by Ozu—once you start, it’s hard to stop. So after last week’s “top twenty-five” of all time, here at Mid Century Cinema we’ve decided to drum up a few more lists, for your consideration. But remember The Rules of the Game, including, especially: (1) no complaining, only debating. If…
What is your favorite movie? We are often asked that question here at Mid Century Cinema, and our stock response is to reject the question with a dismissive, even haughty wave of the hand. “Favorite”? “Best”? “The Greatest”? Just what are those words supposed to mean when talking about the movies? And to compare one…
Worth seeking out is Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine), just released in yet another characteristically marvelous special edition from the Criterion Collection. Day for Night is a movie that is in love with the movies—Roger Ebert called it “not only the best movie ever made about movies,” but also “a…
A visit to the Harvard Film Archive afforded an opportunity to see Robert Altman’s HealtH. The film, shot in 1979, was screened in 1980 but shelved by a hostile studio-in-transition, and not properly released until 1982. One of Altman’s most obscure films, it remains largely unavailable and so despite its modest reputation the chance to catch…
Noir week at MCC reached its conclusion with the pitch-perfect classic Out of the Past – one for the time capsule if you were looking to preserve the essence of noir for future generations – before wrapping up class with a consideration of neo-noir, and a very close read of Chinatown. (In Hollywood’s Last Golden…
Noir week continues at Mid Century Cinema (and at Cornell’s Adult University) with two classics, The Big Sleep and Gilda. The justly beloved Big Sleep comes with a famous backstory—in the can in 1945, the film was shown to American servicemen overseas, but with distribution schedules juggled by the end of the war, Sleep was…