The 2025 70mm Film Festival Arrives at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre

Celebrating the beauty of celluloid and the visual power of large format film, the annual 70mm Film Festival returns to Chicago’s historic Music Box Theatre this month. Eleven films will be featured across two weeks from August 8 to August 21. This year’s program features several new prints, first-time showings, and a few returning favorites. Individual screening tickets are available now on the Music Box Theatre website and priced at $15 general admission of $12 for Music Box members. A series pass is also available and priced at $100 for non-members and $80 for members.

To those less experiencee with legitimate 70mm film presentations, series attendees and film viewers can marvel at the format ability to bring out the texture and weight of small details. Spectacle-level films rarely look better when shown this big, bright, crisp, and sharp. Paired with good sound, the enveloping communal experience is really something.

For this year’s iteration of the 70mm Film Festival, the Music Box programmers are bringing back the Ultra Panavision 70 format of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and this year’s massive Ryan Coogler opus, Sinners, showing for the first time in Chicago in 70mm. In addition, Universal Pictures has brought a recently discovered original 70mm blowup print of Backdraft, a Chicago staple lionizing the Chicago Fire Department. In another new treatment, the festival will be presenting a newly struck 70mm print of the Director’s Cut of Steven Spielberg’s masterful Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Continuing into more classics, Disney has also brought their participation to the 70 Film Festival with archival prints of Cleopatra and Sleeping Beauty. Both only screen a single time during the two-week program. To round out the field, the perennial favorites of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dunkirk— three top-shelf epics from three of the best filmmakers in history. Folks, to see some of these masterpieces the way they were intended is the treat of treats for cinephiles.

This film features a 15-minute intermission and screens with the Music Box’s very own 70mm print.

2001 has been a staple of the 70mm festivals at the Music Box since their inception, and one might say Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction epic isn’t just “the ultimate trip” but the ultimate 70mm viewing experience. It’s beautiful, confounding, filled with extraordinary music, images, and color, boring at times, mind-blowing at others, kinda long, and completely unforgettable. It has an overture, an entr’acte, an intermission, and our projectionists have a page-long set of instructions so they know when to dim the lights and open the curtain at exactly the right moment.

Directed by Ron Howard, Chicago firefighting brothers Stephen (Kurt Russell) and Brian (William Baldwin) have been rivals since childhood. Brian, struggling to prove himself, transfers to the arson unit. There he aids Don (Robert De Niro) in his investigation into a spate of fires involving oxygen-induced infernos called backdrafts. But when a conspiracy implicating a crooked politician and an arsonist leads Brian back to Stephen, he is forced to overcome his brotherly competitiveness in order to crack the case.

This film features a 15-minute intermission. One Show Only! Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison, Cleopatra meets Julius Caesar and plans to lure Caesar to her boudoir in order to forge an alliance with Rome so that she may hold on to her Egyptian empire. When Caesar is stabbed to death in the Roman Senate, Cleopatra is left without an ally, and Egypt is up for grabs. When Roman general Mark Antony comes along, she seduces him in hopes of making him into her new protector. But, under the charms of Cleopatra, Mark Antony is reduced from an awesome and dominating general to a sniveling, drunken wimp. At the Battle of Actium, Mark Antony is defeated and Cleopatra withdraws her troops, dooming Mark Antony and his army. With Egypt in peril, Antony and Cleopatra, the doomed lovers, meet each other for the last time, as the enemy forces close in.

Richard Dreyfuss stars as cable worker Roy Neary in Spielberg’s sci-fi hit, who experiences a close encounter of the first kind – witnessing UFOs soaring across the sky. Meanwhile, government agents have close encounters of the second kind – discovering physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the form of a lost fighter aircraft from World War II and a stranded military ship that disappeared decades earlier only to suddenly reappear in an unusual place. Roy and the agents follow the clues that have drawn them to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind – contact. The 70mm Film Festival will show the director’s cut of the film.

A young Gelfling named Jen sets out to restore order to his planet by recovering a glass shard from the broken and powerful Dark Crystal. A delightfully creepy collaboration between Jim Henson and Frank Oz, The Dark Crystal presents a darker side of the muppets and features some of the best animatronics of the 1980s.

From filmmaker Christopher Nolan comes the epic action thriller Dunkirk, nominated for eight Academy Awards and the winner of three. The film opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by enemy forces. Trapped on the beach with their backs to the sea, they face an impossible situation as the enemy closes in. Nolan twists his tryptich storytelling from there with a deep ensemble cast.

Eight-time Academy Award nominee Stanley Kramer presented this yarn in 1963 about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure. Regarded by many as one of the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a pileup of slapstick, one-liners, and a star-filled cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a bevy of comedy legends. For sheer scale of silliness, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is unlike any other, an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. For the festival, this film features a 15-minute intermission.

Lawrence of Arabia is an account of the life and adventures of T.E. Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole. David Lean’s finest film is the rare historical epic that works on nearly every level, combining awe-inspiring production values with a genuinely moving story of a deeply imperfect man. Made by people who really meant business, the locations were so hot and dry that they caused cracking in the emulsion of the camera negative. Don’t watch this one at home and enjoy the 15-minute intermission and overture during the 70mm Film Festival.

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood visits a fairy tale of 1969 Los Angeles, where everything is changing. TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) make their way around an industry they hardly recognize anymore. The ninth film from the writer-director features a large ensemble cast and multiple storylines in a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood’s golden age.

Declared by many to be the film of the years so far, Sinners comes from Oscar-nominated Black Panther filmmaker Ryan Coogler. Starring a double performance from Michael B. Jordan achieved with practical and special effects, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again after trying to leave their troubled lives in Chicago behind. Back in Mississippi, they discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.

Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney’s second widescreen production was shot in Super Technirama 70 format, something normally used for huge non-animated films like Spartacus. This width and stretch gives a tremendous amount of depth to Disney’s beautiful multi-plane compositions while adapting the Tchaikovsky ballet in their own fanciful and family-friendly way. The print coming to the 70mm Film Festival is Disney only 70mm print.

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Operating since 1929, the Music Box Theatre has been the premier venue in Chicago for independent and foreign films for more than four decades, playing host to over 200,000 patrons annually. It currently has the largest theater space operated full time in the city. The Theatre is independently owned and operated. Its sister company, Music Box Films, is dedicated to curating a diverse repertoire of films from around the world and distributing them throughout the US. Music Box Theatre and Music Box Films both engage audiences with exciting alternatives to mainstream entertainment.

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