It’s that time of year – the season of “best of” lists – and our now-emerging 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 favorite home video releases, not favorite movies, so there is an emphasis on discs…
Days apart in the last week of November, filmmakers Nicholas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci left us. The turn–the-page pairing of two representative-of-something artists sounded echoes of July 1997, when Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart died on the first and the second of the month—quite the “they don’t make them like that anymore” farewell to the…
So, we don’t really write negative reviews here at Mid Century Cinema, for two reasons. First, we’re not in the review game. In fact, we’re a little wary of that enterprise, in which creative people work long and hard to produce something they value, and then someone else wanders by and passes summary judgement on…
On a number of occasions here we have invoked something we dubbed the “three screenings rule”—that it is hard to fully come to grips with a movie until you have seen it three times. Thus although we will often, even with great enthusiasm, share a few words about a movie seen only once, we nevertheless…
MCC favorite Olivier Assayas has a new film out—the French title is Doubles Vies (Double Lives). We were not able to see it at the New York Film Festival (especially sorry to have missed the Q&A that followed there), but thanks to the new branch office we did catch the screening arranged by the Boston…
Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side of the Wind, was shot in early 1970s—but left unfinished at the time of the great man’s death in 1985. In the decades that followed, the fate of the hundred hours of footage Welles shot was entangled in impossible legal and financial complications. But against all odds, and…
Elliott Gould recently celebrated his eightieth birthday, which presents a fitting moment to appreciate his contributions as one of the notable participants in the New Hollywood. From 1968 to 1977 (stretching slightly here to include Capricorn One, a ridiculous movie that we have a tremendous fondness for), Gould appeared in a score of feature films….
As many local followers of Mid Century Cinema are aware, we are opening up a branch office in Boston. To cut the ribbon on the new regional headquarters we thought we’d give a quick shout out to our ten favorite films shot in the local area (remembering always the Andre and Wally rules about all…
Stanley Kubrick would have turned ninety on July 26, and in noting the occasion, our crack staff reported the anomaly that despite the fact that he is one of our favorite filmmakers (and one for whom that powerful illusion of personal affinity is particularly pronounced), Kubrick is, to date, relatively underrepresented on these pages. So…
The specular career of MCC favorite Ingmar Bergman stretched across seven decades; in anticipation of Bergman’s centennial (July 14), an earlier post offered a career overview and user’s guide to (almost) every one of his feature films. Here we hone in on the eight films written and directed by Bergman from 1966 to 1973: Persona,…