HEIGHTS THEATER

One of the most beloved of Hollywood's dark comedies returns to the Heights Theater. When Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) visits his Brooklyn home to show off his new wife to his spinster aunts and oddball uncle, he figures nothing can go wrong. But when Mortimer's psychopathic brother shows up with a doctor (who just happens to be Peter Lorre) the body count rises and the laughs never cease.

Follows a Formula One driver who comes out of retirement to mentor and team with a younger driver.

When stick-up artist “Heliotrope” Harry comes home after escaping the cops, he finds his devious wife, Lilly, in the arms of another. Enraged, Harry shoots his rival, and before he’s caught, leaves his baby girl on the doorstep of a rich, childless couple. While in the big house, he’s kept abreast of daughter Alice’s progress by his former associate, Froggy. But when Lilly finds the girl and seeks revenge, Harry is able to get free and tries to set a trap to keep his daughter safe. One of the earliest productions from David O. Selznick, Forgotten Faces is a newly restored masterpiece of silent melodrama, not available for streaming anywhere!

Live comedy with VHS tapes! BRAND NEW SHOW FOR 2025! Joe Pickett (The Onion) and Nick Prueher (Late Show With David Letterman) have over 14,000 VHS tapes in their cluttered office in Brooklyn and will take viewers on a guided tour of their latest/greatest finds in this brand new Volume 11 show for 2025. Highlights include a psychotic dollar store salesman, a video catalog of frightening porcelain dolls, two wonderfully homemade Bigfoot videos and a new age “miracle” treatment from the 80s called “Psychic Surgery.” (90 mins - contains nudity, language, clowns) “I think I speak for fans everywhere when I express gratitude for their continued hunt for hilariously bad videos. I hope the search never ends.” -Steven Hyden, Uproxx

We’ve been asked to screen Hocus Pocus for years, and it’s finally here! When Salem, Massachusetts teenager Max accidentally resurrects three witches from the seventeenth century, and those witches happen to be comedians Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, the results is one of the most hilarious (and beloved) pictures from the 1990s!

Lieutenant Aldo Raine is a battle-tested solider in the U.S. Army during World War II. His goal: recruit a commando group of Jewish-American soldiers to do “one thing, and one thing only: kill Nazis!” This is Quentin Tarantino’s World War II, full of blood, brilliant dialogue, great actors, all the while referencing spaghetti Westerns and Italian action films. Inglourious Basterds was a tremendous hit and introduced the world to the amazing Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his slimy performance.

Yvonne (Frances Drake) is a gorgeous actress. Steven (Colin Clive) is a famous pianist. Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is an insane scientist who is in love with Yvonne. When a train accident wrecks Steven’s hands, Dr. Gogol does the happy couple a “favor”… by transplanting the hands of an executed psychopath onto Steven’s arms. Fully healed, the pianist finds a trail of bodies in his wake, and he begins to suspect that these hands have a will all their own. From this wonderfully ludicrous plot comes a horror film with tremendous emotional impact, grounded in Lorre’s disturbing, and heartfelt, performance as Gogol.

Hans Wieland is a brilliant actor, a leading figure in German cinema. When the Nazis pressure him to divorce his Jewish wife, Elisabeth, he refuses. Finally, political pressure becomes too much, and, realizing that he will be arrested, his wife to be sent to a concentration camp, he faces the ultimate test of his love. Based on the real-life story of actor Joachim Gottschalk, Kurt Maetzig’s Marriage in the Shadows was the first movie (produced under Soviet auspices) to confront Germans about their treatment of Jews. A brilliant and heartbreaking film, shot like a noir but filled with the rarefied emotions of a melodrama, this rare screening should not be missed.

Pete, Delmar and Ulysses (Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro and George Clooney) escape a chain gang in 1930s Mississippi in the Coen Brothers’ riotous take on Homer’s Ulysses. Featuring some of the best folk musicians of the turn of the century, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a modest hit in its day, has since gone on to be one of the Coen’s most revered classics.

In the sixteenth century, bandits have been invading a small mountain village, depleting it of its rice harvest and leaving its inhabitants in a state of perpetual near-hunger. A group of three brave villagers goes to the nearest town, hoping to entice down-on-their-heels samurai to help defend the village with the promise of rice. What ensues is one of the most thrilling, and emotionally moving, action epics ever made. The Seven Samurai has always been high on list of the greatest films ever made, and is an absolutely entertaining film that leaves its viewers enthralled and devastated. The Heights presents the gorgeous new digital 4K restoration from Janus.

Do we really need to explain this one? Perhaps no movie musical is as beloved as Singin' in the Rain, which has sold out the Heights Theater three times in the last four years! What a wonderful feeling!

Boris Karloff met his match with Elsa Lanchester, who plays the Bride of Frankenstein and sports perhaps the greatest hairdo in Hollywood's long history of great hairdos. Her performance was years ahead of its time, the kind of thing that wins Oscars today and was the perfect foil to Karloff. James Whale attempted to camp up his entry, but the result is a film that many consider superior to the first, more emotional and less stagy than the first, and perhaps the greatest entry of Universal's celebrated horror films.

This brave and biting comedy by Charlie Chaplin was his first sound film, and most successful picture. Released at a time when the U.S. was still in a tenuous truce with Germany, The Great Dictator not only satirized the Fuhrer, but accurately portrayed Hitler's hunger for world domination, and his dangerous policies against the Jews, perhaps the first major American film to do so. The Great Dictator is not only one of the greatest movies of all-time, but perhaps the most important comedy ever made.

From the hearts and minds of Stephen King and Mike Flanagan comes THE LIFE OF CHUCK, the extraordinary story of an ordinary man. This unforgettable, genre-bending tale celebrates the life of Charles 'Chuck' Krantz as he experiences the wonder of love, the heartbreak of loss, and the multitudes contained in all of us.

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is a tough-as-nails, cool-as-a-cucumber detective in San Francisco. When he’s hired by the gorgeous Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) to find her lost sister, everything seems to be great. Until his partner is killed, and Spade finds himself hot on the trail of the Maltese Falcon, a legendary statue made of gold and jewels, “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Enter Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), two of the slimiest (and most entertaining) crooks you’ll ever meet, and the result is one of the great classics of film noir. So popular was their rapport that Greenstreet and Lorre went on to make numerous pictures together.

Jack Torrence, a recovering alcoholic, retreats to the Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, in tow, in the hopes of breaking his writer's block. But the hotel is host to a variety of dark secrets, none more disturbing than those in Room 237. The Shining is one of Kubrick's more startling masterpieces, and Jack Nicholson's performance is the stuff of legend.

One of the most popular films of all-time arrives at the Heights Theater! Poor Maria (Julie Andrews) is a nun who is just too free-spirited to do anything right in the convent. So, she’s placed as a governess to the stern Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his seven children, who are models of discipline. Thank goodness Maria is there to help them become happy kids again! Director Robert Wise pulled out all the stops making this blockbuster, whose music people have adored for generations. Winner of five Academy Awards.

Blaine, Missouri is small town whose local amateur theater, led by the indomitable Corky St. Clair (Guest), plans to put on a show to commemorate the town’s 150th anniversary. Pulling together all the citizens, who battle for choice roles, Corky’s Red, White and Blaine might just be their undoing! Guest’s star-studded mockumentary is hilarious, and features brilliant comic performances from Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard and Guest himself.

A Heights Theater tradition, one of our most popular events - an event that sells out year after year! You will not want to miss the perennial TECHNICOLOR favorite, WHITE CHRISTMAS, on the big screen! Plus.....ON OUR STAGE! The big show starts with a special 20 minute concert by the wonderful MAUD HIXSON, singing a stocking full of your favorite holiday classics! Accompanied by Rick Carlson on the piano as well as A BOUNCING BALL SING ALONG at the end!! Also... A fantastic preshow concert by LOU HURVITZ and ED COPELAND on the Heights Mighty Wurlitzer!

To Glensheen devotees and local cinema buffs, this Gothic old dark house suspense film is an absolute must-see! Shot completely on location in Duluth in the winter of 1971, You'll Like My Mother stars Patty Duke, a very sinister Richard Thomas (John Boy from The Waltons), and an utterly chilling Rosemary Murphy as the mother you'll love to cringe from. However, the real star of this film is the glorious Glensheen Mansion, which you'll explore (with a terrified Patty) from the cellar to the attic!