Dryden Theatre

06/26/2026

Silent Movie (35mm)
📅 Saturday, June 27, 7:30 p.m.
🎬 Series: 100 Years of Mel Brooks

Mel Funn (Brooks), a washed-up Hollywood director, announces his plans to make a contemporary silent movie. With the help of collaborators Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman), Mel sets out to recruit a top-notch cast (Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, Marcel Marceau and Anne Bancroft) in order to secure funding for his magnum opus. Mel Brooks gambled big — and won — with this boldly uncommercial attempt at recapturing the magic and hilarity of the pre-sound era. Brooks’s affectionate homage is not entirely silent, but the one spoken word of dialogue comes, ingeniously, from the least expected mouth. Though not the smash success of Blazing Saddles, this loving satire has, like Young Frankenstein, aged beautifully, and there’s a cadre of fans who argue it’s as good — if not better — than anything else Brooks directed during the 1970s.

06/25/2026

Agatha's Almanac (DCP)
📅 Friday, June 26, 7:30 p.m.
🎬 Series: Rochester Premiere!

Fiercely independent 90-year-old Agatha Bock lives alone on her ancestral farm. Despite health challenges, she defiantly tends to her land, cultivating heirloom seeds passed down through generations. Employing antiquated techniques, Agatha plants and harvests her expansive field of watermelons, beans, flowers, herbs, and vegetables entirely by hand. Without a car, cell phone, running water, or even a functioning landline, Agatha’s meditative processes and daily rituals form a vivid counterpoint to the rapid pace of contemporary life.

Shot by an all-female crew—including director Amalie Atkins and cinematographer Rhayne Vermette— over six years on 16mm film, using a windup Bolex and an ArriSR2 studio camera, the project captures the handmade materiality inherent in both the medium of film and Agatha’s tactile world. Her century-old farmhouse, with its grey exterior, contrasts with the bursts of vibrant colour and texture inside. Unchanged since the 1950s, her home serves as a living archive of a vanishing era, rooted in her esoteric practices that predate modern conveniences. Agatha’s Almanac offers a window into the experiences of a nearly lost generation, whose values and ways of living are at risk of fading as the world rapidly changes.

06/24/2026

Join us THIS FRIDAY, June 26, at 7:30pm for the Rochester Premiere of AGATHA'S ALMANAC (2025)

06/24/2026

Shots from the bench! Join us TONIGHT at 7:30PM to see this 35mm print of ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, which is the next installment in our Summer Trip Through Europe(an Cinema) 🗺️

📸Photos taken during inspection by one of our amazing projectionists, Casey Sanders!

06/23/2026

We are super excited to host the screening of this fascinating documentary! 🐛 Check out the details here:

Broccolo is collaborating with the Dryden Theatre to present "The Extraordinary Caterpillar", which explores the vital role of caterpillars in our ecosystem.

06/23/2026

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (DCP)
📅 Wednesday, June 24, 7:30 p.m.
🎬 Series: A Summer Trip through Europe(an Cinema) | The Sight & Sound Club

One night, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), an aging cleaning woman, wanders into an unfamiliar bar during a downpour. She ends up dancing with a young Moroccan guest worker named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem). Soon they are close friends, then lovers, then they decide to be married, despite their near 20 year age difference. For Emmi’s family and co-workers, the marriage is a complete disgrace, for Ali’s friends, it's bewildering. The prejudices of race, age, and class the two confront in the face of their marriage only proves to strengthen their relationship. It’s when they rejoin their respective social worlds that conflict and heartbreak arises. To say Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, in which an older woman falls for her younger gardener to her children and her friends’ disgust, is to simplify the unique power of both films. While delicate in its treatment of tenderness and love, Fassbinder places the story in the brutal world of the city, where the characters cannot escape their confined surroundings, and violence boils just under the surface.

06/22/2026

Shots from the bench! Join us TOMORROW EVENING at 7:30pm for a screening of this 35mm print of SESSION 9.

Facing his company’s financial ruin, hazmat expert Gordo (Peter Mullan) agrees to take on a rush job stripping asbestos from the decaying walls of a condemned mental health facility. While the ever-professional Gordo fights to get the work done on time, personal grievances and clashing personalities threaten the cohesion and sanity of the members of his ragtag cleanup crew (David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Josh Lucas, Brendan Sexton III). Meanwhile, the disturbing history of the hospital, its patients, and its brutal treatment methods lie waiting in the ruins of the building itself and in left-behind audio tapes of patient interviews. Part of the trend of shot-on-video horror films that came in the wake of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Session 9 was shot on location at the real-life abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital. With lingering cinematography from director of photography Uta Briesewitz, this surreal and dread-inducing cult classic explores what happens when a person or place loses its identity – and what happens afterwards.

Introduction by and post-screening discussion with Selznick student Casey August.

📸Photos taken during inspection by one of our amazing projectionists, Winna Carrasco!

06/21/2026

Join us THIS TUESDAY, June 23 for the next installment in the Lose Yourself series, programmed by the 30th class of The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. Next up is SESSION 9, which will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Selznick student Casey August 🎤

06/19/2026

July at the Dryden: Spaceballs (Saturday, July 25, 7:30 p.m.)

One of Brooks’s most quotable films, this Star Wars send-up takes on the mega-franchise, American politics, and Hollywood itself. Luke Skywalker, excuse me, Lone Starr must do battle with the evil President Skroob (Brooks) and Dark Helmet for the hand of Druish Princess Vespa and the air over planet Druidia. With the help of a diminutive merchandise-shilling mystic named Yogurt (also Brooks), a half-man/half-dog co-pilot, and a purity defending droid, can Lone Starr and his band of weirdos save the day?

06/19/2026

Young Frankenstein (35mm)
📅 Saturday, June 20, 7:30 p.m.
🎬 Series: 100 Years of Mel Brooks | Free for Members

Mel Brooks followed-up his anarchic Western parody Blazing Saddles with something even better: a spot-on spoof of the great Universal horror pictures of the 1930s. In perhaps the finest sustained parody ever made on film, the manic Gene Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (that’s pronounced Fronk-en-steen), reluctant heir to the man who re-animated dead life. With the help of two assistants (goggle-eyed Marty Feldman and Teri Garr), Dr. F. resumes his grandfather’s work and creates his own monster (Peter Boyle). The uniformly sterling and hilariously funny cast also includes Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, and Gene Hackman.