Latest Posts

Tonight: Contemporary Color at the North Park Theatre

May 2, 2017

Tonight, the North Park Theatre will be hosting a special screening of the Ross Brothers’ documentary Contemporary Color in collaboration with Cultivate Cinema Circle. The 2016 film documents the 2015 concerts organized by David Byrne to celebrate the highly “sophisticated folk art form” known as color guard, the athletic dance routines featured during high school and college game halftimes that accompany marching bands, in this context substituting indie bands for the marching bands. Featuring performances by 2017 Record Store Day Ambassador St. Vincent, Nelly Furtado, tune-yards, Dev Hynes, How To Dress Well, Lucious, Zola Jesus, Beastie Boy Ad Rock, and color guards from across the country, Contemporary Color looks looks musically, visually, and emotionally intense, and worth checking out on the book screen with the sound turned up like they do it at the North Park. Tickets are $10.50 and show starts at 7pm.

Tonight: Midnight Purple Rain At The North Park

April 29, 2016

Tonight The North Park Theatre joins in the many Prince tributes happening around WNY  (and the world) with a midnight screening of the 1984 classic Purple Rain. Proceeds go to Music Is Art and Prince videos will be shown to get the crowd ready for the movie that made Prince an international star; a glorious rock and roll B-movie with the best soundtrack ever and magnetic performances from our dearly departed Purple One, love interest Apollonia, and  onscreen “foil” Morris Day. Show starts at 11:55. Prince tribute screenings of Purple Rain will also be happening this weekend at the Riviera Theatre Saturday night in North Tonawanda and at the Transit Drive-In in a wonderful double feature this weekend with Bowie’s Labyrinth, a reminder of just how lousy 2016 has been for music fans. Wear purple to all the above and say goodbye to a legend gone too soon.

Tonight: Montage of Heck

August 20, 2015

For one night only, the fine folks at Cultivate Cinema Circle teamed up with North Park Theatre to bring one of the year’s most-acclaimed films to Buffalo, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. With production beginning nearly 8 years ago, Brett Morgen became the first filmmaker ever offered full authorization to make a documentary on Kurt Cobain. Granted this privilige, Morgen was given access by the Cobain family to over a decade’s worth of home movies, diary enteries, audio tapes, and artwork. What Brett Morgen has crafted is a vibrant and harrowing multimedia collage that seeks to recreate who Kurt Cobain was as a human being. Rather than recap the pop mythology of Nirvana, Morgen’s film tells the human story about a deeply damaged outsider who brought his childhood pain to his art. A pain that somehow resonated with a public who had never heard anything like it, to make him[...]

Gimme Shelter to Screen at the North Park Theatre

June 23, 2015

Next Thursday, July 2nd, the North Park Theatre will be starting the final countdown to the Rolling Stones’ show at Ralph Wilson Stadium by hosting a special screening of Gimme Shelter. Directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zerwin, Gimme Shelter is the legendary and harrowing documentary that chronicled the Stones’ 1969 tour and the infamous Altamont Free Concert that unofficially ended the Summer of Love and the 60’s in general, and it’s everything you’ve ever heard about it. This is an absolute must for 1) Stones fans, 2) documentary film lovers (the Maysles brothers!), and 3) film buffs, and you have two chances to see it on the North Park big screen next Thursday at 7pm and 9:30pm Tickets can be purchased at the box office or online here.

The Wrecking Crew One Night Only at the North Park Theatre

March 30, 2015

Next Wednesday, the North Park Theatre will be hosting for one night only the documentary The Wrecking Crew, chronicling the legendary Hollywood studio musicians that played on hits by Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Nancy Sinatra, Simon & Garfunkel, Glenn Campbell, and countless others. Their contributions to music history and global pop culture are profound, but their efforts have been largely unsung, until now thanks to this film, which lit it up on the festival circuit before arriving in Buffalo next week. The Wrecking Crew were musicians’ musicians, the ones studios called first when they needed hit music for artists recording throughout Los Angeles or for a TV show or film, and they included conductor/arranger Jack Nitzsche, Hal Blaine,  Carol Kaye, Dr. John, Leon Russell, and Niagara Falls native Tommy Tedesco, whose guitar can be heard in Bonanza, M.A.S.H., Batman, Green Acres, the[...]

God Help The Girl Opens at the North Park Theatre

October 3, 2014

One of the most exciting development in Buffalo this year has been the rebirth of the venerable North Park Theatre on Hertel Avenue. Beyond the wonderful ongoing renovation efforts restoring the theater to a condition minter than in our wildest dreams, it’s the revamped programming made possible to the upgraded digital projection system that’s re-positioning the North Park as one of the cultural focal points of the city, with an Italian film festival, a well curated family matinee series, and other special shows like Monty Python Live and the NY Films Critics series. This bold programming continues this weekend with the local debut of international indie film God Help The Girl from Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. Originally a girl group offshoot of Belle & Sebastian featuring songs by Murdoch written from a female perspective, the work evolved into a cycle of songs and a script and low budget indie movie[...]

The North Park Theatre to Screen A Hard Day’s Night

July 21, 2014

The 1964 classic A Hard Day’s Night has been digitally restored and remastered, and will be gracing the big screen at the also recently restored North Park Theatre, which screened the original when landed here 40 years ago, this week through Thursday. Directed by Richard Lester and featuring some band called The Beatles on the cusp of global domination, A Hard Day’s Night is nothing short of a masterpiece, a celebration, and send up of The Beatles by The Beatles that’s breathlessly entertaining, hilarious, and yes, like it says in the trailer, revolutionary. Yes, Elvis was a movie star too, but he was Elvis, in movies. A Hard Day’s Night, however, features George, John, Paul, and Ringo in a movie about themselves, a movie explicitly designed to sell their art to a potential worldwide audience, and present and solidify a public image they’d crafted, an example of self commodification that redefined youth[...]