Hooray for the Anamorphic Lens

CinemaScope turns 50 this month, and the Film Society at Lincoln Center in New York is celebrating with a series of widescreen masterworks by Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Terence Malick, John Ford, Brian De Palma and many others. The American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is also showing a series of international classics, sci-fi operas, and westerns taking advantage of the wide, wide screen through September 7. Among them are the film that started it all, the Biblical epic "The Robe," and Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," in which Fritz Lang says of the format: "It's good for nothing but funerals and snakes."

Learn more about CinemaScope at the American Widescreen Museum, or rent "2001: A Space Odyssey" (photo) for your own private festival.