As the calendar year comes to a close, movie list season has again arrived—even if this year the very sound of the word “list” sends shivers, inviting attention to the predictable disaster of the recently dropped Sight and Sound decennial poll of the “greatest films of all time.” (As we wrote, all too presciently, eight…
It was a pleasure to sit down (virtually) with Extract Editions, who reached out to us to have a short conversation about the movies, and in particular, about criticism and cinephilia. The interview inspired a welcome walk down memory lane, and a fond look back at my informal film school, that is, the time I…
Thee Days of the Condor has been much on our minds lately, what with its eyebrow-raising inclusion on our “Sight and Sound Ten Greatest Films of All Time” ballot, and the related decision to include the movie in our Seventies Film class this summer at Cornell’s Adult University. (A pleasant surprise, which derived from Keith…
The educational outreach branch of Mid Century Cinema is developing a new class, which will be taught in the coming fall semester: “A Cinema of Resistance.” This of course raises the musical question, “What the heck is a cinema of resistance”? Well, most narrowly, the phrase refers to films made in dissent of a prevailing…
Once a decade, the British film Journal Sight and Sound produces its “Greatest Films of All Time” list, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 critics, programmers, distributors and film scholars. Last time around, in 2012, there was some excitement as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo unseated the perennial “this is officially the greatest movie of all…
When last we discussed Alfred Hitchcock, it was to celebrate the movies he made in the 1940s, in support of the contention that it was his finest decade. The stakes of course could not have been higher, and this also outed us as choosing sides in that most sensitive of topics – one that somehow…
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,…