Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Sunday, November 3 | Doors: 4:00pm | Screening: 5:00pm | $5 Tickets 

With the presidential election scheduled for next month, we wanted one more opportunity to celebrate the Season of Friendship with a screening of the quintessential “humans and aliens can be friends” flick: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a reminder that if we can befriend the aliens, we can befriend anybody, no matter how alien they seem to us.

This 1977 sci-fi masterpiece explores how we would respond to alien contact through the lenses of shady government agencies, an Indiana electric lineman, and a single mother. 

Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Writen by: Steven Spielberg, Hal Barwood, Jerry Belson.

The movie runtime is 2 hours and 18 minutes, Rated PG, and will be screened on DCP. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind continues the Movies at the Palace Season of Friendship. We chose that theme after asking ourselves what we need most to get through 2024. Our supporters and fans helped us select the movies in the series, including Little Women (2019), which is scheduled for December 15. 

Please note: The Season of Friendship is a different series than Movies at the Palace with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is not scheduled to be at this screening. 

UNITED PALACE HISTORY  

The ornate United Palace opened in 1930 as the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, a deluxe movie theatre and vaudeville house, the last of the five Wonder Theatres in New York City and New Jersey. Its first act as a movie theatre ended in April 1969 with a screening of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” 

With a groundswell of community support and our good friend, patron, and neighbor Lin-Manuel Miranda, movies returned to the United Palace in 2013. Since then we have screened over 100 feature films, from world premieres (“In the Heights” and “Halftime” as part of the Tribeca Festival) to all-time classics (“It’s A Wonderful Life”), to community favorites (the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom” about local school children winning a citywide dance contest). 

Our goal is to have the cinematic experience come alive for audiences too used to watching movies on their phones or TVs. 

One of our highest compliments came from Robert DeNiro who, speaking before a 50th anniversary screening of “The Godfather,” described watching a movie at the United Palace as: “The moviegoing experience doesn’t get any better.”