New York, NY (May 15, 2024) – Film at Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announce this summer’s free Outdoor Film Series lineup, part of LCPA’s Summer for the City, beginning June 13.

​​Summer for the City is Lincoln Center’s three-month-long summer festival featuring thousands of artists from New York City and beyond, performing across multiple outdoor and indoor stages. From June to August, Summer for the City will animate every corner of Lincoln Center’s 16-acre campus with hundreds of free and Choose-What-You-Pay concerts, film screenings, dance nights, theater, comedy, silent discos, civic events, family-friendly days, and more, a reflection of the multifaceted communities of New York. For more information, visit SummerfortheCity.org.

This year’s Summer for the City Outdoor Film Series, curated by FLC, will be hosted entirely on the big screen in Damrosch Park, with ample seating and on-site concessions. The eclectic lineup will kick off on June 13 with a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 Oscar-winning drama-thriller Black Swan starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, with Aronofsky in-person to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Searchlight Pictures. The series will round out June with screenings of Before Sunrise (1995) and, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Before Sunset (2004), the first two installments of Richard Linklater’s beloved European romance trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, on June 20 and June 21, respectively. Timed to “India Week,” Summer for the City’s celebration of the beauty and vibrancy of Indian culture, S.S. Rajamouli’s action-packed epic RRR (2022) will screen on July 11, featuring masterfully edited action sequences and inventive choreography, including the show-stopping dance number “Naatu Naatu,” which won the Oscar for Best Original Song. On July 25, Andrew Fleming’s 1999 comedy Dick, starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams as two bubbly teen blondes in a deliciously irreverent reimagining of the Watergate scandal, closes out the series just in time for this year’s presidential election and the film’s 25th anniversary.

Organized by Madeline Whittle.

Acknowledgements:
Searchlight Pictures

Entry to Summer for the City outdoor screenings at Damrosch Park will be available for FREE via General Admission—first-come, first-served. Filmgoers can line up off of W. 62nd Street, along the east side of Damrosch Park. Seating will open to the public 30 minutes before showtime. In addition to General Admission, LCPA is offering a FREE Fast Track option. Reservations will open every Monday at noon for that week’s events and close at 3:00 pm the day of the show, or when Fast Track tickets are all booked—whichever comes first. All Summer for the City outdoor screenings will use headsets. In the event of inclement weather, screenings may be rescheduled. Follow @filmlinc on X for the latest updates.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All screenings will take place outdoors at Damrosch Park

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky, 2010, U.S., 108m
Natalie Portman gives a virtuosic, Oscar-winning turn as Nina Sayers, a sheltered but intensely driven young dancer with the New York City Ballet, on the verge of getting her big break: a chance to perform the dual role of the Black and White Swans in the company’s production of Swan Lake. When the talented, worldly Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company, Nina fears that her own claim to the role could be in jeopardy, and begins to experience hallucinations, buckling under the compounding pressures and expectations imposed by the dance company’s icy, egomaniacal artistic director (Vincent Cassel); her mother (Barbara Hershey), herself a former ballerina, with whom Nina shares a claustrophobic city apartment; and her embittered predecessor, the company’s recently ousted prima ballerina (Winona Ryder). Leaning into the expressionistic, velvety chiaroscuro of Matthew Libatique’s 16mm cinematography, director Darren Aronofsky conjures an almost uncanny, starkly forbidding vision of Manhattan, hinting that the punishing, cutthroat conditions that animate Nina’s insular professional milieu are of a piece, perhaps, with the world that extends beyond the theater walls.
Thursday, June 13 at 9:00pm - Introduction by Darren Aronofsky

Before Sunrise
Richard Linklater, 1995, U.S./Austria, 101m
English, German, and French with English subtitles
“Think of this as time travel.” Twentysomething American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets twentysomething Parisienne Céline (Julie Delpy) on a cross-Europe train. He convinces her to disembark in Vienna and kill time with him before his flight the next morning; over the next 12 hours, they walk, talk, look around, and fall desperately, unexpectedly in love. Linklater’s third feature is many things: a sensitive portrait of youth, with all its fault lines, painful insecurities, deep-set arrogances, and deeper-set longings; a curious, digressive city symphony; a rich meditation on the act of looking; a love story that, for all its idealized meet-cute trappings, stays rooted in a concrete language of gestures, glances, vocal inflections, and shifts of weight; and, in the end, a devastating study of the passage of time. Seen in relation to the subsequent two films in Linklater’s celebrated Jesse and Céline trilogy, Before Sunrise takes on new, still sadder resonances. Taken on its own, it’s simply one of the great movies—past, present, or future.
Thursday, June 20 at 9:00pm

Before Sunset
Richard Linklater, 2004, U.S./France, 80m
English and French with English subtitles
Before Sunset picks up nine years after Sunrise’s open-ended finale. The immediate question—did Jesse and Céline reunite in Vienna six months later, as planned?—soon gets eclipsed by other, knottier ones: questions of commitment, fidelity, responsibility, and the great subject of Linklater’s trilogy, time. The setting has been relocated from Vienna to Paris, and the time frame narrowed from 12 hours to two. Jesse and Céline themselves have changed: they’re less self-conscious and less self-satisfied, worried about the extent to which their lives are ossifying, nervous about settling into adulthood. But the most jarring change is in Delpy and Hawke, whose noticeably tauter, wearier faces seem to have registered all their characters’ setbacks and disappointments. Before Sunset is packed with moments of heartbreaking emotional clarity—a series of initial flashbacks, a painful ferry-boat ride, a taxi meltdown—and ends, like its predecessor, with a gesture that works as both a tease and a consummation (with some help, in this case, from Nina Simone).
Friday, June 21 at 9:00pm

RRR
S.S. Rajamouli, 2022, India, 187m
English and Telugu with English subtitles
In the summer of 2022, Telugu-language cinema was thrust into the American pop-cultural limelight thanks to the unprecedented box office success of RRR, S.S. Rajamouli’s 1920-set action blockbuster, which charts an imaginary friendship between real-life anti-colonial revolutionaries Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao, Jr.), a leader of India’s marginalized Gond tribe, and A. Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an officer of the Indian Imperial Police with mysterious personal objectives. Described in Film Comment as “preposterously entertaining,” the film toggles between registers, alternating the good-humored buoyancy and warmth of a classic buddy comedy with the earnest emotional and metaphorical intensity of mythically inflected melodrama. Rajamouli expertly deploys these tonal dynamics in service of an extraordinary cinematic spectacle, which dazzles on the big screen thanks to its sweeping, inventively choreographed and masterfully edited action sequences—plus the showstopping dance number “Naatu Naatu,” for which composer M.M. Keeravani became the first Indian artist to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Thursday, July 11 at 8:30pm

Dick
Andrew Fleming, 1999, U.S./Canada/France, 94m
Director Andrew Fleming’s unabashedly farcical, deliciously irreverent reimagining of the Watergate scandal situates a pair of unexpected protagonists at the center of the storied incident: Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams), two bubbly teen blondes who, on the fateful night of June 17, 1972, unwittingly cross paths with Republican operatives in the midst of breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, thereby inadvertently leading to the burglars’ arrest. When a class field trip to the White House occasions a surprise encounter with President Nixon (ingeniously impersonated by Dan Hedaya) and lead operative G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer), who recognizes Betsy and Arlene from their earlier encounter, the two girls soon find themselves caught up in the inner workings of the administration and the scandal’s disastrous fallout. Boasting unforgettable supporting performances from a murderer’s row of SNL and Kids in the Hall alumni (most notably Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch as a buffoonish Woodward and Bernstein), and a raucous period soundtrack made up entirely of Top 40 hits from the decade, Fleming’s film remains a high-water mark of Gen X political satire a quarter-century after its release—and wound up serving as a crucial launchpad for the adult careers of Dunst and Williams, both of whom have since gained recognition as among the finest actors of their generation.
Thursday, July 25 at 9:00pm