Classic Films Now: Network

About this event

Run Time: 121 Minutes. Recommended for ages 18+ A nation distrusts its institutions. News has become spectacle. Ordinary people fight to matter. Welcome to 1976. Best Picture nominee about a mentally unstable news anchor who, after being told he’s to be fired, becomes a media superstar when he begins delivering nightly rants and threatens an on-air suicide for his final broadcast. Paddy Chayevsky’s script won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay; Peter Firth received a posthumous Best Actor award as the unhinged newsman; and Faye Dunaway won Best Actress as a scheming network exec. Classic Films Now brings major works of cinema back to the big screen, films that not only defined their own time but continue to speak to ours. Each installment of the series gathers a group of landmark films curated around a theme, period, artist, or movement, inviting audiences to discover how the works connect with contemporary life. This fall, Classic Films Now kicks off with a three-film series devoted to 1976, a remarkable year in American cinema and a revealing moment in the nation’s cultural imagination. Released in the shadow of Watergate, Vietnam, urban crisis, and the Bicentennial, All the President’s Men, Network, and Rocky offer three sharply different portraits of American life at a time of great transition and uncertainty. Screenings will be introduced and hosted by Rafer Guzmán. Rafer writes about movies, music, and popular culture for Newsday. He has been a film critic for WNYC, a co-host of the independent podcast “Movie Therapy,” and a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal.