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The warm weather may be here to stay, so NYC's annual outdoor screenings can't start soon enough. We've got a complete calendar of every outdoor screening from now to September—bookmark it. Today we're happy to add the forthcoming selection at Queens' Socrates Sculpture Park. Co-presented by Film Forum in collaboration with Rooftop Films, this year's series is thematically organized around the idea of the river. The movies include some serious heavy hitters. The free screenings start at sundown, but before each one is a live musical performance beginning at 7pm, so get there early. Here's the complete lineup along with our own program notes:
July 6 The African Queen Katharine Hepburn reportedly based her performance in this first-rate 1951 adventure on Eleanor Roosevelt; Humphrey Bogart, meanwhile, finally won the Oscar he’d long deserved. Simple and sublime.
July 13 L’Atalante Jean Vigo’s final film is his crowning achievement: a stunning, heartbreakingly romantic mix of naturalism and fantasy, about two kids in love travelling the Seine in a barge. Who knows what the director might have accomplished had he lived to be, say, 30.
July 20 Sonita A teenager living in an Iran shelter commands the lens with sassy confidence in this new documentary.
July 27 Rivers and Tides Andy Goldsworthy, an artist gleefully complicit in the destruction of his own work (his pieces are often made of fragile objects like leaves or twigs), is the subject of this fascinating documentary, which explores the ephemerality of the natural world.
August 3 Girl Asleep This one’s about a wallflower, her surprise 15th birthday and those awkward but relatable moments of growing up shy.
August 10 Suzhou River Lou Ye claims that he hadn’t seen Vertigo when he concocted this tale of a man who loses a woman to suicide, then becomes obsessed with another woman who looks exactly like her—and might be her. Lou’s composer had seen it, though, as the score quotes pieces of Bernard Herrmann’s love theme at key junctures.
August 17 Aguirre, the Wrath of God Klaus Kinski is mesmerizingly bonkers as a conquistador in search of seven cities of gold, and the monkey-ridden finale is unforgettable.
August 24 Embrace of the Serpent This b&w Amazonian adventure knocked out viewers who submitted to its hallucinatory spell.