A Summer of Movies on Film

Or you might want to follow along as Glenn Kenny launches a Summer of Sex Comedies at the Decider. In response to “a new prudery among younger movie watchers, boiling down to a directive that sex scenes in movies are only permissible if they ‘advance the story,’” Kenny will spend the next several weeks writing about films in which “sex is the story.” He’s begun with Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), starring Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), featuring Jayne Mansfield. Kenny notes that Jean-Luc Godard “responded so strongly to Tashlin that he began a correspondence with the director; several scenes in JLG’s A Woman Is a Woman, from 1961, are directly inspired by Girl.”

Summer is also a season for going out, and if it’s to the movies, why not make your theatrical experience complete and see a film projected from film. The opportunities are plenty. If you’re in the Boston area, the Somerville Theatre’s annual 70 mm and Widescreen Festival opens this evening with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), includes Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) and Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966), and will wrap on Monday with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As Sean Burns puts it for WBUR, that’s “five days of eye-popping, old-fashioned cinema spectacles presented according to their original specifications at the lovingly restored, 111-year-old movie palace.”

The Chicago Film Society, founded by projectionists in 2011, carries on screening 35 mm and 16 mm prints “from studio vaults, film archives, and private collections.” Upcoming screenings include Mikio Naruse’s Lightning (1952) this evening, followed by Yasujiro Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956), and eventually culminating in a spectacular season-wrapper, Technicolor Weekend (August 22 through 24), featuring Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Robert Clouse’s Black Belt Jones (1974), Stanley Donen’s Arabesque (1966), and more.

On Friday, New York’s Metrograph will open its series In ’Scope and Color! with 35 mm prints of Max Ophuls’s Lola Montès (1955) and Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958). Film Forum will screen John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) on 35 mm on July 7, and from July 31 through August 24, the Museum of the Moving Image will roll out its annual See It Big! 70 mm series, featuring 2001, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), and two high-velocity movies starring Tom Cruise, both directed by Tony Scott: Top Gun (1986) and Days of Thunder (1990).

In Portland, the Hollywood Theatre’s Summer of Celluloid opens next Thursday with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), followed on Saturday by two more 70 mm prints: 2001 and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997). The 35 mm screenings that follow include Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), George Miller’s The Road Warrior (1981), both volumes of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003 and 2004), and PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2007). The series will wrap with Jaws, whose fiftieth anniversary this month has Steven Soderbergh talking excitedly about Steven Spielberg’s achievement with Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline and Philip Concannon in Sight and Sound.

Also opening next Thursday is the Ultra Cinematheque 70 Fest, a thirty-three-film extravaganza running through August 4 in Los Angeles. Highlights include John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Jacques Tati’s PlayTime (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), and PTA’s The Master (2012). Of course, Angelenos also know that they can always catch a 35 mm double feature at the New Beverly or a 70 mm screening at the Vista, as both theaters are owned—and often programmed—by celluloid enthusiast Quentin Tarantino.

Beginning on July 11, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London will wrap Celluloid Sunday, a series launched in December 2022 to showcase its unique print archive. For nine days, the ICA will screen rare 35 mm prints of thirty films including David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers (1986), Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009).