Ruefully acknowledging its mistake, America wakes up and notices Elaine May

May’s film career—to say nothing of her reputation as a pioneer of modern American comedy—is currently undergoing a widespread reevaluation. In the past year alone, career-spanning retrospectives of her movies have screened at venues like Toronto International Film Festival and New York’s Film Forum (they’re not particularly difficult to program, given that she directed only four movies). Earlier this year, the Criterion Collection released a celebrated restoration of her long-misunderstood and hard-to-find third film Mikey and Nicky, a pitch-black gangster flick starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, and when Criterion’s new streaming service premiered in January, it chose May’s film as the inaugural “Movie of the Week.” (Even The Far Side’s Gary Larson felt compelled to issue an eventual mea culpa: “When I drew the [comic], I had not yet seen Ishtar. … Years later, I saw it on an airplane, and I was stunned at what was happening to me: I was actually being entertained.”)

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See also:

• Before The Waverly Gallery, Elaine May Was Calling the Shots on Film - (link)