
It’s All a BIG Conspiracy
July 1–9, with all films on 70mm
Experience cinema on a monumental scale with this summer series charting the evolution of conspiracy as a powerful staple of American cinema through a selection of masterpieces presented entirely on 70mm.
Tickets will go on sale on Friday, June 12 at 2pm, with an early access period for FLC Members starting on Friday, June 12 at noon.
James Cameron
1986|
U.S.|
137 minutes
The true conspiracy in James Cameron’s maximalist, hardware-obsessed search-and-destroy war epic lies in the ruthless business calculus of Weyland-Yutani.
Tim Burton
1989|
U.S.|
126 minutes
Returning to FLC on a 70mm-blow-up print that hasn’t screened in New York City since its original theatrical run in 1989, Tim Burton’s strangely singular superhero blockbuster fundamentally redefined franchise filmmaking at the same time it imagined the nightmare version of consumer culture.
David Lynch
1984|
U.S.|
137 minutes
David Lynch’s Dune remains one of the strangest monuments in American studio filmmaking. Kyle MacLachlan stars as noble heir Paul Atreides, who uncovers an imperial plot engineered to destroy his lineage.
Kenneth Branagh
1996|
U.K. / U.S.|
242 minutes
Released by Columbia Pictures into a U.S. preoccupied with Whitewater, FBI scandals, and anti-government extremism intensified by the Oklahoma City bombing, Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Shakespeare adaptation gave soaring, intricate poetry to institutional mistrust.
Spike Lee
1992|
U.S.|
202 minutes
Articulating state-sanctioned history itself as a conspiracy, Spike Lee smuggled into his big-budget studio biopic a radical analysis of an American life that remains vital, moving, provocative, and unsparing as ever.
Paul Thomas Anderson
2012|
U.S.|
137 minutes
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master suggests, in beguiling, elliptical fashion, how a closed belief system with “secret knowledge” fed on a real hunger for coherence and consolation in post-WWII America.
Jordan Peele
2022|
U.S.|
130 minutes
Jordan Peele has described NOPE as a film about “our addiction to spectacle” and the “insidious nature of attention,” and its conspiracies (like the best of them) are scattered as breadcrumbs throughout his wonderful third feature.
Alfred Hitchcock
1959|
U.S.|
136 minutes
The ostensible conspiracy involves microfilm and Soviet agents in all but name, but Hitchcock’s decision to make his lead (Cary Grant) an advertising man gives this misrecognition road-movie-farce a far more stinging message about freedom from choice in the U.S.
Christopher Nolan
2020|
U.S.|
150 minutes
With its palindromic structure, Ludwig Göransson’s blaring score, a dense, hermetic plot, and nested conspiracies, Christopher Nolan’s “quantum Cold War thriller” is a time-travel blockbuster that arrived in a pandemic-era world already fractured by asynchronous experiences of time.
Brian De Palma
1987|
U.S.|
119 minutes
Brian De Palma transformed a TV property into a subversive crime epic showing Capone (Robert De Niro) not merely as a villain but as the visible face of an over-greased criminal system cloaked behind tailored suits, marble lobbies, opera boxes, and police badges.
TICKET INFORMATION
Tickets will go on sale on Friday, June 12 at 2pm, with an early access period for FLC Members starting on Friday, June 12 at noon. Tickets are $25; $22 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC Members. Save $2 on each ticket with a 3+ Film Package.
About the Series
Conspiratorial thinking has migrated from the margins toward one of the defining moods of our present—not merely the belief in a single grand secret plot but an ambient suspicion that the visible world is organized by forces beyond ordinary perception. Hollywood especially has made this suspicion feel so natural (amusing, even) that we often overlook how many of its most gripping pictures, far beyond the paranoid thriller canon, rely on the seductive notion that the world’s complexities ultimately yield to a secret, meticulously orchestrated logic. “It’s All a BIG Conspiracy” will put this idea under a magnifying glass with a program of 70mm films drawn to the allure of collusion as one of Hollywood’s most pliable and captivating storytelling maneuvers. Amplified by the grandeur of wide-gauge imagery and outsized soundscapes, these films will plunge us into worlds immersive enough to disarm our skeptical distance, yet detailed enough to reward near-forensic scrutiny.
The series brings together films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, James Cameron, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton, Spike Lee, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Jordan Peele. From mistaken identity as Cold War statecraft (North by Northwest) to civic connivance in Chicago and Gotham City (The Untouchables, Batman), palace intrigue both Shakespearean and interstellar (Hamlet, Dune) to postwar cultic doctrine (The Master), state surveillance and the machinery of white supremacy (Malcolm X) to corporate cover-ups on a colonized moon (Aliens), time-traveling espionage (Tenet), and image-making as predation (NOPE), this July Fourth week invites you to peer beneath narratives whose darkly coordinated worlds feel uncannily at home in the American imagination… or simply surrender to the 5-perf spectacle.
Organized by Tyler Wilson.
Acknowledgements:
Film at Lincoln Center’s projectionists: Greg Sherman, Maeve Cavadini, Frank Hudec, Gregory Wolfe, and James Wolfe, and Tim White
Please note: Several films will be screened from the original release prints, which use a vintage magnetic soundtrack. Audio tracks are stored on magnetic stripes attached to the film print itself and are more prone to degrade than optical soundtracks. It will sound louder and richer compared to most 35mm prints and many digital sound systems, but because it’s an older analog format you’ll also hear the wear-and-tear of its many years going through projectors. This is part of the experience, so let every hiss, softness, pop, intermittent silence and visual imperfection remind you of the many audience members who saw this same print before you.





















