ASTORIA, NY.- Museum of the Moving Image and MUBI will present the tenth edition of See It Big: 70mm, New York City’s only annual 70mm film festival, which takes place in the Astoria museum’s grand Sumner M. Redstone Theater each summer. Running July 31–August 24, the series features a thrilling selection of classic and contemporary titles, opening with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that influenced the architecture of the Museum lobby and Redstone Theater and whose prescient depiction of A.I. has only become more relevant; the action blockbusters Top Gun and Days of Thunder, directed by Tony Scott and starring Tom Cruise; Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North by Northwest; and Ryan Coogler’s horror blockbuster Sinners.

At a time when digital projection is the norm, the analog widescreen 70mm format (“70mm” refers to the width of the large-format film strip) delivers a remarkably crisp, luminous image and great color fidelity. With a higher resolution and more light hitting the frame, 70mm film offers a bigger, brighter image, compared to 35mm. It is the ideal film format for ambitious cinematic spectacles and panoramic vistas, while also offering incredible intimacy.

While it is increasingly rare for movies to be filmed in 70mm, some filmmakers continue to champion the format, most famously Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson. With Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to shoot a film in IMAX 70mm, and the first cinematographer to combine IMAX 70mm with Super Panavision, thus capturing images in the tallest and the widest film formats. In addition, Coogler and Arkapaw shot on IMAX EktaChrome film stock, created by Kodak just for their film and known for clean and crisp images with rich and accurate color hues. The Museum’s presentation will be in five-perforation 70mm film in 2.76:1 aspect ratio, a version that Arkapaw called “gorgeous” and Coogler dubbed “the rarest format” of all the many theatrical release versions of Sinners.