Martin Scorsese turned seventy-five on November 17, a milestone that naturally lends itself to looking back at his remarkable career. (Though, we hasten to add, not in a valedictory way—he is currently working on one film, has another in pre-production, and plans are already taking shape for the one after that.) Given that Scorsese’s overflowing…
November 15, 1967 marked another milestone for the emerging New Hollywood—the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s first feature film at the 1967 Chicago International Film Festival. Not that this was obvious at the time. The movie, then with the title I Call First, had been shooting in fits and starts over several years as its not-quite-shoestring budget…
The release of the spectacular Trouble No More provides a fitting moment for our third Bob-post of retrospectives following Dylan receiving the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. The first included a general overview and guidelines for following his Bob-ness; the second featured our user’s guide to (almost) all of his studio albums; here, as previously…
Le Samouraï, the tenth feature film of Mid Century Cinema favorite Jean Pierre Melville, had its premiere in France on October 25, 1967. Over the years it has come to be seen as the representative Melville film, and for many, their favorite of his thirteen movies. It is indeed a masterpiece; and one that is…
This weekend your intrepid correspondent was able to see Ismael’s Ghosts, the most recent offering from Arnaud Desplechin, at the New York Film Festival. An earlier, shorter cut had received mixed notices at Cannes, but we were eager to attend, both in anticipation of the screening and for the promised Q&A with the director that…
Mid Century Cinema favorite Jean-Pierre Melville would have turned 100 on October 20, and his centennial has led to countless celebratory retrospectives, as well as, it would appear, the forging of The Jean Pierre Melville Foundation. We would say it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy—but that would be wrong of us, as he was,…
Truffaut on Cinema is nothing short of a treasure for movie-lovers. François Truffaut sat for about 300 interviews between 1959 and 1984, and every last one of them is collected in this book—and presented with a rather ingenious twist. The interviews were compiled and reorganized by Anne Gillain, and as reassembled the book proceeds thematically,…
Once again it’s that time of year – the Fifty-Fifth New York Film Festival will run from September 28 through October 15 – and as usual there are more great screenings and events than one could possibly hope to attend. The entire forty-five page brochure is worth a close read, but we’ll highlight some of the…
We have added a good bit of new content here at MCC, and thought we’d take the opportunity to walk through what is new (and forthcoming) on the site. Over in “Books, Essays and More,” four new publications can be found: Our Cineaste review of Charles Taylor’s book on the “Shadow Cinema” of the 1970s,…
On August 30, 1967 John Boorman’s Point Blank premiered in San Francisco. It was a fitting choice for a movie that begins and ends at the abandoned island prison of Alcatraz, even though Boorman, in an inspired move, shifted most of the film’s action from tie-dyed, summer-of-love San-Francisco to the cold, impersonal monochromes of Los…