See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex

For many of us, remembering going to the movies in an American multiplex in the 1990s summons not merely feelings of nostalgia but, more importantly, a sense of provocative and pleasurable diversity: of genre, of form, of size, of stardom, of narrative, of tone, of pacing, of narration. At any given moment, you could enter the world of the movie theater and hop and skip among studio-financed movies of wildly varying budgets, from mid-range dramas to star-driven vehicles to eccentric auteur experiments. In this edition of See It Big, we invite audiences to recall these days of multiplex cinema, when you were guaranteed to get whisked away to somewhere transportive, whether the quiet backroads of Clint Eastwood’s Madison County, Iowa; the blinding white limbo of Albert Brooks’s Judgment City; or the future shock of Kathryn Bigelow’s Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium. These are movies that worked as jumper cables for an entire generation of ecstatic cinephiles—none of them tentpoles or sequels—and each deserves to be seen on the big screen. 

See It Big, the Museum’s signature series of classic films presented on the big screen, is organized by MoMI Curator of Film Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film Edo Choi, and Reverse Shot Co-Editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert.