Silent Tuesdays Directed by Paul Leni—a German import who established Universal Studios’ atmospheric style with his 1927 Hollywood debut The Cat and the Canary—this chiller about a murder in an apparently cursed theater stands as one of the few true silent whodunits. Live piano accompaniment by Dr. Philip C. Carli.
Great American Songbook Vincente Minnelli brings Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse together to dance for the last time. Kelly’s performance of the songs “Almost Like Being in Love” and “The Heather on the Hill” is surpassed only by his dance with Charisse among the Highlands in a reprise of the latter song.
Labor Film Series In a near future of airtight international borders and militarized corporate warriors, an underground class of workers plug their nervous systems into a global computer network, becoming “cybraceros,” who manipulate robots from a distance.
Silent Tuesdays Before he was a founding member of United Artists, and before he was the swashbuckler remembered for The Black Pirate (1926) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Douglas Fairbanks was an agile, adept leading man, capable of both humor and romance, as seen in these two films. Live piano accompaniment by Dr. Philip C. Carli
Palme d’Or Winners of the 1960s This disturbing drama of repression and revolution at an English boarding school is director Lindsay Anderson's timely social satire on the student rebellion movements that were rocking the world (the film opened just months after the May 1968 French student uprisings).
Polish Film Festival A nail-biting behind-the-scenes drama about the intense physical and mental labor put into a sport that thrives on its beautiful aesthetics.
Rochester Premiere | The Polish Film Festival Returning to the Dryden for the third time, director Andreas Voigt brings his latest film, a follow-up, of sorts, to his 1992 film Borderland—A Charm. In this most recent film, he explores the lives of people living on or near the border between Germany and Poland.
Great American Songbook Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic musical is brought to the screen with Technicolor verve. The soundtrack is filled with memorable songs, including “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and “I Cain’t Say No,” while the cast shines with performances by Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Eddie Albert, and Rod Steiger.
Member Movie Night | Demme Comedies Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), an employee at a Nevada magnesium plant, imagines he is destined for greater things. On his way home from work one night, he picks up an old man (Jason Robards) who has crashed his motorcycle riding through the desert.
Great American Songbook Frank Sinatra is in proto–Rat Pack form as womanizing nightclub singer Joey Evans in this adaptation of the stage production, with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Stumbling into San Francisco after being run out of his last town for romancing the mayor’s underage daughter, Joey runs into old friend and bandleader Ned Galvin, who wrangles him a job at the Barbary Coast Club.
Rochester Premiere During the summer of 2016, a fishing boat off the shores of Iceland made a most curious catch: four reels of 35mm film preserved at the bottom of the ocean near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where hydrogen sulfide, a volcanic gas, tends to preserve whatever is around it.
Demme Comedies Charlie Riggs (Jeff Daniels) is an investment banker locked into his repetitive Manhattan lifestyle. In order to get a small thrill out of life, he leaves a diner without paying for his lunch. Outside, he’s confronted by Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who recognizes him as a “closet rebel” and offers him a ride back to work.
Palme d’Or Bonus—the 1930s The only film to win the Palme d’Or in the 1930s (then called the “Grand Prix du Festival International du Film”) is this Cecil B. DeMille epic of railroads battling for supremacy in the 1860s.
FREE Admission | Transgender Awareness Week This moving documentary follows a few months in the life of young Sasha, struggling with the gender assigned to her at birth as a boy. In rural France, eight-year-old Sasha’s family (mother, father, three siblings) has recently accepted her gender identity.
Dalton Trumbo: Breaking the Blacklist The day after Dalton Trumbo appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, the opportunistic King Brothers, producers of Poverty Row films, gave him a call. The brothers and Trumbo all knew that, because of the situation Trumbo found himself in, the producers could get an excellent writer for only a fraction of what he would normally cost.
Silent Tuesdays This early Eastman Museum preservation came from an original nitrate print and hasn’t been screened at the Dryden Theatre in six decades! Live piano accompaniment by Dr. Philip C. Carli.
Jonathan Demme Comedies Angela DeMarco (Michelle Pfeiffer) married into a Mafia family, not realizing that she’d have stacks of boxes of electronics in her dining room and that her days would be filled with obligations to dinners and card games with “the family.”
Holidays The original cinematic version of Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough’s 1903 operetta finds Laurel and Hardy inserting themselves into the Mother Goose–inspired storyline. This film retains six of the numbers from the operetta, including “Toyland” and the instrumental “March of the Toys.”
Holidays “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Rosalind Russell was nominated for her fourth Oscar when she duplicated her stage role as everyone's favorite eccentric aunt, a woman who abhors the emptiness of middle-class values and parlays traditional femininity into a comic romp.
