While the Historic Duncan Auditorium undergoes restoration work, we’re taking our Big Picture series on the move this summer with Book-to-Screen adaptations at the Starkey Ranch Theatre Library Cultural Center. The movies chosen are different, the circumstances of their exhibition are different, and in many cases the audiences are different. We’re also about to celebrate our 100^th anniversary, and nothing lasts for a century without internalizing the truth: we must adapt, all the time.

The truth is, not everybody cares that much about what a building used to be, why it was made, how it comes together. Mustering the support for a project like this, and finding the professionals who can make it happen, is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. And once the work begins … well, before you see improvement, all you see is demolition.

We thought Big Picture should spend some time with films that have something to say about the places we live our lives — why they’re special to us, what we’ll do to protect them, and maybe whether the work is worth it.

Earlier this year, Netflix released Nouvelle Vague, a fictionalized retelling of the creation of Breathless (À bout de souffle), one of the most influential early films in what came to be called the filmmaking movement that came to be called the French New Wave. We took a look back at our calendar and found a slightly shameful lack of representation — as much as we adore the movies and creators of the French New Wave, we haven’t shown many of those movies to you. At least recently. And so, presented with the opportunity that Big Picture represents, we decided to do our little part to remedy that.

And so here at Tampa Theatre, as the proverbial snow drifts metaphorically down around us, we find our thoughts turning to the past year and the future. The Theatre celebrated its 99^th birthday in 2025, and we can feel our centennial breathing at our backs like a ghost of Christmases future. So, we’re taking inspiration this year from A Christmas Carol in its various forms — and we’re looking at how two very unusual takes on the story, very different in their loyalty to the tale and the seriousness of their presentation, arrive at the same conclusion: lives are short, joy is rare, and love is precious.

It has become a Tampa Theatre tradition to look back at the lives and careers of some of the titans of the silver screen who we lost over the last year. It’s never easy, either to select who we can recognize in our limited space, or to choose the films with which to memorialize them. We hope our selections this year will do justice to their memory.

Join Big Picture and Tampa Theatre as we put all these movies next to each other and see what develops. Each of them is complex and storied enough to support a decent college course, but we’ll try to cut right to the heart of what makes them interesting. And why people seem to want to keep sitting down in dark rooms and scaring themselves.

Movies don’t need to be musicals to take music seriously. Music has been a vital component of the movie-going experience since before the films themselves had sound: as many of you already know, Tampa Theatre was built as a silent movie house, and staffed a full-time professional orchestra to accompany the films. We’re happy to present three titles in September that incorporate popular music, either the actual music being listened to by the characters in the film or music representative of the time and situation, in a particularly memorable way.

It’s easy to forget, down here, where the change of seasons barely registers. But for most of the time humans have walked the Earth, to be cold was to die. And darkness was coldness. Every year, as the nights grow longer and the plants get browner and a chill starts to sharpen the air, our ancestors’ thoughts turned grim. …And yet if you’ve ever been on a Florida beach on an August afternoon, you know that light and heat can be shockingly scary too. Even dangerous. And because Big Picture likes being contrary, we’ve decided to lead into spooky season this year with a sampler of frightening films that all operate in the sunlight, though each in different ways.

Here at Tampa Theatre, we’re in the middle of our annual Summer Classics series, and that series often includes a Hitchcock film. But something new is revealed when you stand his movies up next to each other, and that’s not an opportunity we get with only Sunday matinees. His favorite themes and motifs gain depth. His creative development and willingness to experiment is made obvious. You can feel his fussy, finicky control over every frame grow, then strain, then dissipate. The Academy may never have committed to the idea that Alfred Hitchcock was the best director, but he was certainly one of the most directors — his body of work over more than 50 features influenced contemporary film (for better or worse) as much as any other single individual in history.

For June, Big Picture is proud to bring you a selection of films that offer iconic representations of historic figures that have come to be integrated into the contemporary perspective of who those historic figures were — or which have, in some cases, subsumed other perspectives entirely. The past is unchanging; history changes constantly. Every generation assembles their own version of history, relevant to their own time, filtered through their own experiences and expectations. And intentionally or not, every fact gets altered slightly in repetition.

Big Picture presents Rebellion and Empire — cinematic perspectives on life in the shadow of tyranny, how the surging tide of totalitarian repression seeps into the foundation of the everyday. Where there are people, there will be hierarchy; hierarchy leads to control, and control leads to suffering. But where there is suffering, there will be resistance. These same ideas echo through our history and our art.

For the next subject of our new Big Picture series, Tampa Theatre offers Dancing, Through Life: a selection of films that all center the experience of dance as a method of escape — escape from a difficult life, escape from an adversarial world, even transcendent escape from the mundane into ecstatic beauty.

Here at Big Picture, we’re all about uncovering the unusual. And so for our second block of themed movies, we present Love on the Rocks: a selection of films about love turned bad, love turned weird, something else turned into love, or love turned into something else. We hope you’ll find that these movies grouped together reveal novel connections between themselves.

There really is magic in movies, you know. They couldn’t exist without it. If your eyes see still images with small variations in fast enough sequence, your brain thinks they’re in motion — it’s a sleight of hand trick, like floating an ace up to the top of a shuffled deck. We can’t wait to show you the Big Picture and welcome you to the show.