Film at Lincoln Center
70 Lincoln Center Plaza
212-875-5825
Whether as a destination itself, a rainy-day retreat, or as a cinematic breather and cool-down from other area activities, Film at Lincoln Center is among the city’s most rewarding cultural venues. One highlight of its summer programming is “Monica Vitti: La Modernista” (June 6-19), a tribute to the stunningly enigmatic Italian actress who worked with Michelangelo Antonioni (L’avventura and Red Desert), as well as with Joseph Losey, Mario Moncelli, Luis Buñuel, and others. “The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us” (June 20-26) takes a deep dive into the dense and richly polyphonic world of the Upper West Side-raised filmmaker’s second and still abundantly rewarding horror-style feature. Of special local note, beginning July 4, is a 70mm showing of the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed 2014 movie Inherent Vice, a sharp adaptation of the 2009 novel by long-time Upper West Side resident Thomas Pynchon. It’s widely believed that Anderson’s next film, opening later this year, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is adapted from Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland.
Intrepid Museum
Pier 86, West 46th Street and 12th Avenue
212-245-0072
intrepidmuseum.org/free-friday-movie-nights
While this military affairs reporter hopes to someday see his favorite US Navy movie, the John Ford-directed Mister Roberts (1955), aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid (launched in 1943), the museum’s three free Friday movie-night offerings are no disappointment. Also, where Mister Roberts is set aboard a Navy cargo ship, this summer’s film choices are thematically tied to the Museum’s most recent exhibition, “Mysteries from the Deep: Underwater Archaeology,” so that wouldn’t quite have worked. Instead, on June 27, there’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the second installment, from 2006, of the popular series starting Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. On July 25, things turn tense with The Abyss, the remarkable James Cameron-directed, underwater, submarine-themed sci-fi thriller from 1989. The series wraps up on Aug. 22 with the hit 2001 animated Disney adventure movie, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which includes among its voice cast Michael J. Fox, James Garner, and Phil Morris, who many may know better as Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld.
Pier i Picture Show
Riverside Park at West 70th Street
riversideparknyc.org/series/pier-i-picture-show/
That’s right, film fans, it looks strange in print, but this outdoor movie series is really at Pier i, lower case preferred for typographical reasons, but upper case is no less correct, as long as people know it’s the letter I as in ideogram, not l as in lamentation because somebody got lost on the way to movie night. (The story is a little complicated, but the short version is that starting at the Battery, Hudson River pier numbers only go up to 99 [which is at West 59th Street]; everything north of here, gets a letter name, thus Pier i, a former car float pier for the New York Central Railroad, at West 70th Street.) Now that we’re here, mark your calendars for a series that kicks off on July 9 with the echt late-1980s teen fave, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; six more pictures follow weekly. Pick hit for hoofers and anyone who remembers the Catskills as a resort destination is 1987’s always crowd-pleasing Dirty Dancing (July 23), while 1969’s Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (Aug. 6) remains a great buddy picture, crime movie, and elegiac western all-in-one.
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
212-727-8110
Year after year, season after season, Film Forum continues to be the city’s greatest repertory theater. Even with its later summer programming not finalized, its early schedule is jam-packed with must-see movies. One highlight is the US premiere of the complete director’s cut of Masayuki Suo’s award-winning comedy Shall We Dance? and another is the original 1979 theatrical version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now. This is significant because Coppola has subsequently tinkered with the film’s editing to interesting but generally less impactful effect. From June 13 to 19, there is a 90th-anniversary tribute to the late, great John Cazale (1935-1978), which includes all five of the feature films he appeared in before his tragic death from cancer: three directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Godfather, The Conversation, and The Godfather, Part II), plus one directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), and one directed by Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter). Also showing: a documentary, I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, including interviews with many of his colleagues and his partner, Meryl Streep. Another Lumet New York picture, 1978’s The Wiz, opens on June 22. While fans of the hit musical that preceded the film have their regrets—especially Diana Ross replacing Stephanie Mills as Dorothy—The Wiz the movie stands as a stunning, if flawed, landmark unto itself: Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Ted Ross, Lena Horne, Mabel King, Richard Pryor, Coney Island—the works!
Anthology Film Archive
32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street
212-505-5181
Always an essential stop on the serious cinephile’s circuit, Anthology Film Archive continues to carry forward the ethos of its beloved, Lithuania-raised co-founder Jonas Mekas, who died, aged 96, in January 2019. Anthologie’s programming is often experimental, political, and radical—sometimes all at once, so while it’s not always the ideal choice for date-night entertainment, couples can snuggle up with more amatory fare afterward. Undoubtedly, the highlight of this summer’s programming is a five-day-long series (June 20-24) by the great film critic and cultural historian J. Hoberman, related to his newest book, published by Verso, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Included in the series are short films, newsreels, documentaries, and some of Hoberman’s renowned pedagogical double projections, i.e., showing related pictures simultaneously to highlight their similarities of form and / or content. Some highlights: Michael Snow’s New York Eye & Ear Control (a play on the famed New York Eye & Ear Infirmary, then at Second Avenue and East 13th Street); Shirley Clarke’s naturalistic 1963 Harlem gang drama, Cool World, with music by Mal Waldron and Dizzy Gillespie; and a film version of the landmark Living Theatre play The Brig.