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…
A recent memo from Mid Century Cinema’s in-house archivist called attention to the fact that there are a slew of new items and updates on the site, many of which might have easily escaped the attention of even dedicated subscribers. Some of these should be familiar to regular readers—in particular, recent appreciations of Karen Black…
Of all the things I learned during what better heeled writers refer to as “book leave” – that is, some time away from the regular beat so that the magnum opus might be attended to – was that Karen Black has a new album out. This was surprising, for a number of reasons, not least…
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…
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…