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70mm with DTS Sound | Music Box Theatre's Exclusive 70mm Print!

Stanley Kubrick’s dazzling, Academy Award®-winning* achievement is a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion. Kubrick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) first visits our prehistoric ape-ancestry past, then leaps millennia (via one of the most mind-blowing jump cuts ever) into colonized space, and ultimately whisks astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) into uncharted space, perhaps even into immortality. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” Let an awesome journey unlike any other begin.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

35mm with Optical Sound

The biggest Western of the 1930s — complete with wagon trains, buffalo hunts, forests as wide as the eye can see, and every genre trope you can name – demonstrated the promise of Fox’s 70mm Grandeur process and introduced audiences to a new would-be star, John Wayne. Alas, the film’s commercial failure sent Wayne back to B-movie cow-punching for nearly a decade. The only complete, surviving example of a Fox Grandeur production (albeit preserved in 35mm), THE BIG TRAIL still radiates a pioneer aura as Walsh exploits the large-gauge format’s depth of field like no production this side of PLAYTIME.

Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm with DTS Sound from Fox/Disney

One of the Hollywood Studio System’s last really wonderful big budget Broadway musical adaptations, HELLO, DOLLY!stars Barbara Streisand as matchmaker Dolly Levi. Walter Matthau is the "well-known, unmarried half-a-millionaire" Horace Vandergelder, who needs a match. Part of the film’s 25 million dollar budget went towards restoring Pennsylvania Railroad Steam Locomotive 1223 for the number “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”. Directed by Gene Kelly (who incidentally hated the widescreen format, but made do), and with Choreography by the great Michael Kidd, HELLO, DOLLY! is a joy to behold.  

CLICK HERE to Read A Message from the Music Box with our Policies & Procedures on Reopening

70mm with DTS Sound from Paramount

A midwestern space melodrama set in the distant and desolate future, INTERSTELLAR stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as two astronauts who leave their families behind in search of habitable worlds for the starving human race. In the era of bloated, self-deflating, CGI-infested blockbusters, INTERSTELLAR is a welcome anomaly: uncompromising, expansive, and very genuinely moving. Shot on 35mm, Vistavision, 65mm and IMAX film with lab work by Fotokem.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

A military spectacle in the tradition of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, KHARTOUM chronicles Britain's 1883 crisis in Sudan. Charlton Heston, who cited KHARTOUM as one of his favorite films, plays general General Charles Gordon, who is sent by British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (Ralph Richardson) to salvage a bloody and untenable situation. Veteran stuntman Yakima Canutt, who was responsible for teaching John Wayne how to fall off a horse, worked as second unit director on the film’s thrilling action sequences. KHARTOUM was the last film to be shot in Ultra Panavision until Quentin Tarantino’s THE HATEFUL 8, 49 years later. 

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm Blowup with Magnetic Sound from Sony Pictures Repertory

Arnold Schwarzenegger IS Jack Slater, and also Arnold Schwarzenegger, and briefly Hamlet, in LAST ACTION HERO! 

From John McTiernan, director of DIE HARD and PREDATOR, and a script co-written by Shane Black (LETHAL WEAPON, THE LAST BOY SCOUT), comes a messy Hollywood meta-comedy/action flick hybrid, lampooning the genre that brought the creative team such great past success. A young movie fan is magically transported into the world of his favorite action hero, in this cameo-laden adventure. A failure at the box office, largely due to opening a week after JURASSIC PARK, LAST ACTION HERO isn’t a flawless film, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

***Saturday, March 14th Screening Presented with Metal Movie Nights | Featuring Metal Vinyl Weekend | Hosted by Chris Larkin and Gregg Elzinga --- Event Kicks off in the Lounge at 10pm with Metal Vinyl Weekend I Music Videos begin at 10:45 in the Theatre I Screening begins at 11***

70mm Blowup with Magnetic Sound from Park Circus

In a Tale of Halley's comet, there’s something wrong, something ancient, something hungry... Tobe Hooper (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, POLTERGEIST) was given almost free reign and a huge budget by producers Cannon Film Group to make this adaptation of Colin Winston’s British science fiction horror novel “The Space Vampires.” With amazing special effects and a score by Henry Mancini, LIFEFORCE is a bewildering guilty pleasure, all the more pleasurable in this rare original 70mm print. 

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm with DTS sound from Fox/Disney

A lavish trip through Europe quickly unfolds into a race against time to solve a murder aboard a train. When an avalanche stops the Orient Express dead in its tracks, the world's greatest detective -- Hercule Poirot -- arrives to interrogate all passengers and search for clues before the killer can strike again.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm with DTS Sound from Netflix

The most personal project to date from Academy Award-winning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón (GRAVITY, CHILDREN OF MEN, Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN), ROMA follows Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker for a family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma in Mexico City. Delivering an artful love letter to the women who raised him, Cuarón draws on his own childhood to create a vivid and emotional portrait of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil of the 1970s. Shot digitally on the Alexa 65 camera and beautifully transferred to 70mm film, we’re proud to bring back Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece in his preferred exhibition format.

In Spanish with English subtitles

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm with Magnetic Sound from Disney

**Unfortunately, previously-announced guest, TRON Cinematographer Bruce Logan, has had to cancel his Chicago trip, and will no longer be attending Q&As at our 70MM screenings. We apologize for any inconvenience.**

With Walt Disney Animation presumed comatose, the studio doubled-down on PG-rated live action sci-fi, first with THE BLACK HOLE and then TRON. Produced at the dawn of the personal computing age, TRON presents a credulous, colorful, and oddly literal vision of how data works, complete with rudimentary CGI graphics that still look sharp under 70mm scrutiny. Like an ‘80s version of THE WIZARD OF OZ set in an eight-bit arcade, the boundary between cold flesh and digital fantasy remains glitchy for Jeff Bridges and his gang of his happy hackers.  

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm Blowup with Magnetic Sound from Paramount

Federal agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) fights crime and corruption during Prohibition in Chicago. Unable to take down legendary crime boss Al Capone (Robert De Niro) on his own, Ness recruits an elite group of lawmen who won’t be swayed by bribes or fear, including Sean Connery, who won his only Oscar for his performance as Irish-American cop Jimmy Malone. Filmed on location in Chicago, THE UNTOUCHABLES features a sweeping score by Ennio Morricone.

A Part of The Music Box 70mm Film Festival 2020

70mm with DTS Sound from Park Circus

Adapted from the incredibly successful Broadway play, even the magnificent 70mm frame has trouble containing the raw energy of WEST SIDE STORY. Robert Wise (THE SOUND OF MUSIC, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL) co-directed with Jerome Robbins, who had a nervous breakdown midway through production - the results are visible on screen, and it was worth it. For our money, this is one of the best looking prints of the festival, it also has the best end credits sequence by Saul Bass.