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…
The first episode of The Bob Newhart Show aired on September 16, 1972. It would run for six seasons, and garner a well-deserved reputation as one of the great television shows of the seventies—often paired in historical memory with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That coupling makes sense, as for much of its run the…
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…
As the calendar turns to mark the official start of the dog days of summer, it is once again time for that annual Mid Century Cinema ritual: unveiling our Top 10 films—from fifty years ago. 1972 was another outstanding year for the movies, and in crafting this inescapably idiosyncratic and infinitely contestable list, regarding omissions,…
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…
Fat City, the film that marked the beginning of John Huston’s remarkable late career resurgence, premiered at the Cannes film festival on May 12, 1972. The legendary filmmaker, then sixty-six and coming off several uninspired efforts and an even longer stretch since he’d really had something to say, might have easily shuffled quietly into his…
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…
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is now Fifty Years Old—which is two years older than Marlon Brando was when he portrayed Don Corleone in the movie. It is, inarguably, a great film, even something of a landmark, now adorned with all the requisite ribbons of coveted official approval. (It checks in at twenty-one on the…
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…