Movies are more fun on a huge screen. Much more fun.
That’s why Museum of the Moving Image will host See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex from Saturday, May 25, to Tuesday, July 16.
Twenty-five films will screen at least once, and as the title suggests, this year’s theme is the 1990s, a decade that changed the landscape of American cinema, bringing independent, idiosyncratic films into the mainstream.
See It Big features comedies, documentaries, dystopian noirs, romances, and thrillers. General admission is $15, but seniors and students can attend for $11 and youths (ages 3–17) only pay $9. All screenings take place at MoMI’s Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room.
The schedule and descriptions are below and online here.
Mars Attacks!
Friday, May 24, 7 pm
Sunday, June 2, 5:30 pm
Director Tim Burton. 1996, 106 minutes. Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Jack Black, Lisa Marie, Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, and Michael J. Fox. Burton amassed a star-studded cast to riff on 1950s Sci-Fi schlock in this goofball satire about an invasion of ray gun-wielding Martians.
Princess Mononoke
Sunday, May 26, 1 pm
Saturday, June 1, 12:45 pm
Director Hayao Miyazaki. 1997, 134 minutes. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles. This animated film defied the norm of children’s fare with easily defined heroes and villains with a complex, violent tale that pitted warring clans and creatures against each other in 14th-century Japan.
The Thin Red Line
Sunday, May 26, 4 pm
Friday, May 31, 6:30 pm
Dirirector Terrence Malick. 1998, 170 minutes. 35mm. Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, and John C. Reilly. This World War II epic is adapted from a James Jones novel about the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign.
Defending Your Life
Saturday, June 1, 3:30 pm
Sunday, June 2, 3:15 pm
Director Albert Brooks. 1991, 112 minutes. Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, and Lee Grant. After a stupid mistake, a Los Angeles advertising executive dies after his car crashes into a bus. The thirty-something wakes up in Judgment City, a way station through which the recently deceased must pass before moving on to the next plane of the afterlife. Here, all souls must defend their life decisions in a trial. While fretting, the protagonist falls for Julia (Streep), whose generosity and good nature seem to make her future undeniable.
Joe Versus the Volcano
Saturday, June 1, 5:45 pm
Sunday, June 2, 1 pm
Director John Patrick Shanley. 1990, 102 minutes. Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Dan Hedaya, Robert Stack, Ossie Davis, and Abe Vigoda. This surreal comedy follows a workaday schlub (Hanks) who finds out he has a fatal “brain cloud” with mere months to live. He dumps his office job to embark on a final adventure to a tropical island to toss himself into a volcano for a slam-bang farewell, but nothing works out as planned.
The Big Lebowski
Saturday, June 1, 8 pm
Friday, June 7, 3 pm
Directors Joel and Ethan Coen. 1998, 117 minutes. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Peter Stormare. Arguably the Coen brothers’ funniest film, this scene-to-scene blast folds an array of visual jokes and verbal gags into an absurdly convoluted plot that casts unemployed, eternally stoned Los Angeles bowling bum Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Bridges) as a loser, reluctantly investigating the kidnapping of the trophy wife of a wealthy local with whom he shares a name.
Trainspotting
Friday, June 7, 6 pm
Sunday, June 9, 6 pm
Director Danny Boyle. 1996, 93 minutes. Ewan McGregor, Kevin McKidd, Ewan Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald. Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel about heroin addicts in Edinburgh is a film of provocative incongruities. McGregor plays an unemployed twenty-something whose potential is constantly thwarted by the quality of the friends he keeps. The spasmodic rhythms of characters always looking for the next fix interplay in a city in freefall.
Rumble in the Bronx
Friday, June 7, 8 pm
Saturday, June 8, 6:15 pm
Director Stanley Tong. 1995, 87 minutes. Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Françoise Yip, and Bill Tung. The main character follows a cop from Hong Kong to New York for an uncle’s wedding, where he gets involved in gang warfare. A dazzling mix of raw fight scenes and balletic stunts ensue.
The Straight Story
Sunday, June 9, 1 pm
Saturday, June 22, 1 pm
Director David Lynch. 1999, 112 minutess. 35mm. Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, and Harry Dean Stanton. A septuagenarian buys a John Deere tractor and drives it from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his estranged, ailing brother.
Boomerang
Sunday, June 9, 3:30 pm
Sunday, June 16, 12:30 pm
Director Reginald Hudlin. 1992, 117 minutes. Eddie Murphy, Robin Givens, Halle Berry, David Alan Grier, Martin Lawrence, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, Chris Rock, and Geoffrey Holder. Eddie Murphy’s Marcus Graham is an executive in a high-profile New York advertising firm who meets his match in serious-minded Jacqueline (Givens), who gets a job promotion he feels he deserved.
Dick Tracy
Saturday, June 22, 3:30 pm
Sunday, June 23, 12:30 pm
Director Warren Beatty. 1990, 105 minutes. 35mm. Warren Beatty, Madonna, Al Pacino, William Forsythe, Glenne Headly, Seymour Cassel, Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates, and James Caan. Beatty’s big-budget, color-drenched adaptation of Chester Gould’s classic mid-century comic strip is a visual delight from start to finish, featuring noir photography by Vittorio Storaro.
The Fisher King
Friday, June 14, 3 pm
Saturday, June 15, 5:45 pm
Director Terry Gilliam. 1991, 137 minutes. Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, and Michael Jeter. Tragedy, comedy, fantasy, realism, romance, and adventure combine in this Manhattan-set tale of a disgraced radio shock jock (Bridges) who finds redemption in the friendship of a mentally ill, homeless man (Williams) who believes himself to be a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail and the conditional love of a video store proprietor (Ruehl, who won an Oscar for her performance).
The Last of the Mohicans
Friday, June 14, 7:15 pm
Sunday, June 16, 3:15 pm
Director Michael Mann, 1992, 112 minutes. Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Wes Studi, Russell Means, Jodhi May, and Eric Schweig. Adapted loosely from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, this sweeping love story pairs Hawkeye (Day-Lewis), the adopted white son of a Mohican warrior, with Cora (Stowe), an English general’s daughter.
The Bridges of Madison County
Saturday, June 15, 3 pm
Sunday, June 16, 5:45 pm
Director Clint Eastwood. 1995, 135 minutes. Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley, and Victor Slezak. This adaptation of a best-selling novel by Robert James Waller depicts frustrated Iowa housewife Francesca Johnson (Streep) and photographer Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), who passes through town while her husband and children are away.
The Secret Garden
Sunday, June 16, 1 pm
Friday, June 21, 4 pm
Director Agnieszka Holland. 1993, 101 minutes. Kate Maberly, Maggie Smith, Heydon Prowse, Andrew Knott, John Lynch, and Irène Jacob. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel comes to life in this gothic adaptation. Maberly unsentimentally plays the stubborn, sad Mary Lennox, who, after being orphaned, is cast out of colonial India and sent to live with distant relatives in a gloomy English mansion. There, she explores the shadows and crooks of the enormous house, unlocking its secrets and wonders.
Darkman
Saturday, June 22, 8 pm
Sunday, June 23, 6 pm
Director Sam Raimi. 1990, 96 minutes. Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, and Larry Drake. In his first action leading role, Neeson plays a scientist seeking vengeance against the gangsters who destroyed his lab and almost burned him to death, but left him with supernatural strength.
Clueless
Friday, June 28, 6 pm
Sunday, June 30, 3:30 pm
Director Amy Heckerling. 1995, 97 minutes. Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy, and Stacey Dash. The sleeper smash of summer 1995, set in Beverly Hills, pokes fun at SoCal privilege. Popular, rich, but somehow lovable Cher Horowitz (Silverstone) tries to give fish-out-of-water Tai (Murphy) a status-altering makeover, while juggling her own love-hate relationship with her former stepbrother Josh (Rudd).
Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion
Friday, June 28, 8 pm
Sunday, June 30, 1:30 pm
Director David Mirkin. 1997, 92 minutes. Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, Janeane Garofalo, Alan Cumming, Camryn Manheim, and Julia Campbell. This film uses the comic premise of the high school reunion as a launching pad for an eccentric, surreal odyssey.
Hoop Dreams
Saturday, June 29, 1:15 pm
Sunday, June 30, 1:15 pm
Director Steve James. 1994, 170 minutes. DCP. This documentary follows two talented basketball players over six life-shaping years. William Gates and Arthur Agee are Black students from inner-city Chicago recruited into a predominately white high school with an excellent basketball team. They commute 90 minutes to school, where they struggle to adapt to the new social environment and shoulder expectations of family and friends back home.
Thelma & Louise
Saturday, June 29, 5 pm
Friday, July 5, 4 pm
Director Ridley Scott. 1991, 130 minutes. Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, and Brad Pitt. Two close friends’ lives are forever changed after one of them is sexually assaulted in public and they decide to take matters into their own hands.
Bound
Saturday, June 29, 7:45 pm
Sunday, June 30, 5:30 pm
Directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski. 1996, 108 minutes. Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, and Joe Pantoliano. Tilly is Violet, the frustrated girlfriend of Pantoliano’s small-time hood Caesar. Gershon is Corky, the handyperson working on the apartment next door who seduces Violet. Sex leads to danger when the women hatch a plan to steal nearly $2 million of embezzled money from Caesar.
Strange Days
Friday, July 5, 7 pm
Sunday, July 7, 5:30 pm
Director Kathryn Bigelow. 1995, 145 minutes. Angela Bassett, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, and Vincent D’Onofrio. This anxiety-filled drama of near-apocalypse is set in Los Angeles at the turn of the 21st century. Fiennes is a former LAPD officer who has turned into a black marketer of SQUIDs, virtual recordings of others’ experiences that attach directly to the viewer’s cerebral cortex. A fierce Bassett is his bodyguard, who gets caught up in the investigation of a murder case following a snuff SQUID recording.
Speed
Saturday, July 6, 8 pm
Saturday, July 13, 8 pm
Director Jan De Bont. 1994, 116 minutes. Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, and Jeff Daniels. A city bus is rigged with a bomb that will go off if it drops below 50 miles per hour. Reeves is a SWAT officer who climbs onboard to save the passengers. Bullock is a civilian enlisted to steer the lumbering vehicle when the driver goes down for the count.
Menace II Society
Friday, July 12, 5:30 pm
Sunday, July 14, 3:30 pm
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes. 1993, 97 minutes. 35mm. Tyrin Turner, Samuel L. Jackson, Larenz Tate, Jada Pinkett, and Charles Dutton. Immersed in poverty and violence in the Los Angeles projects, 18-year-old Caine Lawson (Turner) wants a different kind of life. With the help of a mentoring teacher (Dutton) and his supportive girlfriend (Pinkett), he plans to leave the neighborhood for good. But thanks to a series of escalating and tragic events, he is caught in a deepening moral trap defined by loyalty and retribution, making escape seem more and more elusive.
Pulp Fiction
Friday, July 12, 7:30 pm
Sunday, July 14, 5:30 pm
Director Quentin Tarantino. 1994, 155 minutes. 35mm. With John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Amanda Plummer, and Tim Roth. Tarantino became a household name with his surprise blockbuster, a film of elaborately intertwining stories that all but rewrote the rules of American narrative filmmaking.
“In this edition of See It Big, we invite audiences to recall the days of ’90s era multiplex cinema,” stated MoMI Editorial Director Michael Koresky, who organized the program with Curator of Film Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film Edo Choi, and Reverse Shot Co-Editor Jeff Reichert. “These are movies that worked as jumper cables for an entire generation of ecstatic cinephiles—none of them tentpoles or sequels—and each deserves to be seen on the big screen.”
Museum of the Moving Image is at 36-01 35th Ave. in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District.
Top image: Joe Versus the Volcano/Warner Bros;
Bottom image: The Big Lewbowski/Universal Pictures