A new program of 1970's films with strong female characters will be featured at the Museum of Moving Image starting November 14, 2025 and continue with screenings until January 4, 2026. The women are found both in front of and behind the camera. The scheduled films featured in American Woman: Reframing '70s Cinema may include conversations with filmmakers at some screenings.

Grab your movie tickets at the museum website: https://movingimage.org

The following is the current schedule of films and more may still be added: 

Nov. 14 at 6:30 pm introduced by critic and author Carrie Courogen

Nov. 16 at 5:30 pm

Director John Cassavetes, 1974, Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. Rowlands plays Mabel Longhetti, a housewife and mother descending into a mental breakdown that creates a schism with her uncomprehending husband, Nick (Falk).

Nov. 15 at 2 pm followed by a conversation with Molly Haskell

Nov. 22 at 6 pm

Director Alan J. Pakula, 1971, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Roy Scheider. Film noir mixes with sexual-revolution candor as Fonda stars in her Oscar-winning role as Bree Daniels, a sex worker who becomes an unwilling participant in a missing-persons case. Dim lighting and disorienting angles amplify the dread.

Nov. 23 at 3:30 pm with Director Barbara Kopple in person

Kopple's 1976 Oscar-winning documentary charts a coal miners' strike in Kentucky.

Nov. 16 at 3:15 pm

Director Sydney Pollack, 1973. Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford are the ultimate odd couple: Katie is a politically committed leftist Jew, while Hubbell is a WASP without strong commitments. They meet in college and get swept away by love and the McCarthy Era's anti-communist purges.

Nov. 21 at 6:30 pm introduced by critic Kelli Weston

Nov. 22 at 3:30 pm

Director Robert Altman, 1977, Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule. Altman's dreamlike study of down-and-out women in a tiny California town shows the filmmaker at the summit of his powers as a surreal image-maker and humane storyteller. Altman gave Duvall a role of astonishing depth and pathos in Millie, a self-involved health spa worker whose life intersects with that of a mysterious new coworker, Pinky, played by Spacek.

Nov. 22 at 2 pm

Director John Berry, 1974. Diahann Carroll plays a Harlem single mother who opens up to the possibility of romance with James Earl Jones's good-natured garbage collector. She had just starred in the groundbreaking series "Julia" and become the first Black woman to win a Tony for leading actress in a musical in "No Strings."

Nov. 23 at 1 pm

Union Maids

Directors Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Miles Mogulescu, 1976, 48 minutes. This film looks at young women's attempts at industrial organizing in the early 20th century.

Directors Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, 1971, 52 minutes. This piece follows six women from young children to adults in their 30s, as they reckon with social forces.

Nov. 23 at 4 pm

Director Frank Perry, 1970. Carrie Snodgress earned an Oscar nomination as Tina, a stultified housewife and mother gradually coming to the realization that she cannot bear her insufferable, manipulative man-child of a husband (Richard Benjamin). She falls into an affair with a more commanding lover (Frank Langella).

Nov. 28 at 6:30 pm

Nov. 30 at 3:30 pm

Director Peter Bogdanovich, 1972. This tribute to the screwball comedies of the 1930s brims with gags, stunts, and goo-goo eyed romantic glances between Ryan O'Neal, a bespectacled musicologist studying igneous rocks, and Barbra Streisand, who plays Judy, whose name might as well be Trouble. The cast of characters converge at a San Francisco hotel conference where mistaking identical suitcases launches the couple into a fight for their lives.

Nov. 29 at 3 pm

Nov. 30 at 5:30 pm

Director Peter Bogdanovich, 1973. Real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal play a con man and a girl who might be his daughter. They work their way across the Depression-era South. For her work, Tatum became the youngest-ever Oscar winner.

Nov. 30 at 1:30 pm 

Director Irvin Kershner, 1972. Barbra Streisand stars in this idiosyncratic take on 1970s womanhood that's based on first-generation feminist Anne Roiphe's eponymous 1970 novel. Amid daydreams and fantasies, Streisand's bored New York housewife resists telling her neglectful husband she's pregnant.

Dec. 5 at 6:30 pm

Dec. 7 at 5:30 pm

Director Brian De Palma, 1978. Stephen King's best-selling debut novel became a film about a mercilessly teased high schooler who exacts outsized revenge on her peers at the prom. Oscar-nominated Sissy Spacek offers an achingly humane portrayal of this misunderstood monster whose abusive mother, played by Oscar-nominated Piper Laurie, is one of horror cinema's most frightening villains.

Dec. 6 at 2 pm

Dec. 13 at 4 pm

Director Joan Micklin Silver, 1975. Silver's film evokes turn-of-the-century tenement life in Manhattan's Lower East Side through a young wife named Gitl (Carol Kane) who has just arrived from an Eastern European shtetl. Kane received an Oscar nomination for her delicate performance.

Dec. 6 at 4:30 pm

Jan. 3 at 2 pm

Director Paul Mazursky's 1978 comedic drama stars Jill Clayburgh as a well-to-do Manhattan woman whose snake of a husband (Michael Murphy) leaves her, without warning, for a younger woman after 16 years of marriage. With delicacy, wit, and heartrending realism, the film charts her coming into her own, including falling into an affair with an attractive painter (Alan Bates).

Dec. 7 at 1 pm

Director Gary Nelson, 1976. This live-action Disney classic depicts a mother and daughter who awake one morning, following a bitter argument, to find that their bodies have been supernaturally switched. Written by Mary Rodgers and based on her young adult novel, this film showcases two of the era's quirkiest and most delightful women: Barbara Harris as put-upon mom Ellen; and Jodie Foster as surly teen Annabel.

Girlfriends 

Dec. 7 at 3:15 pm with director Claudia Weill in person

Melanie Mayron, Anita Skinner, Bob Balaban, Christopher Guest, Eli Wallach, and Viveca Lindfors. This 1978 low-budget gem follows twentysomething Upper East Side photographer Susan (Melanie Mayron) who, alongside her poet roommate Anne (Anita Skinner), tries to navigate the professional and romantic dead ends of 1970s city living.

Dec. 12 at 7 pm with an introduction by Melissa Anderson who will sign her book "The Hunger: Film Writing 2012–2024."

Dec. 14 at 2 pm

Directors D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, 1979. In April 1971, a smackdown literary event occurred at New York's Town Hall theater. Dialogue on Women's Liberation pitted provocateur Norman Mailer (whose recent essay "The Prisoner of Sex" ignited a storm of outrage) against a panel of women activists and writers: Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos, and Diana Trilling.

Dec. 13 at 6 pm

Dec. 20 at 1 pm

Director Elaine May, 1971. As writer, star, and first-time director, Elaine May established herself as an original talent with this oddball romance and black comedy. Walter Matthau plays a spoiled playboy who loses his wealth and plans to marry a klutzy botanist (May) and murder her for her money.

Dec. 14 at 5:30 pm with Co-director Muffie Meyer and editor/producer Susan Froemke in person.

Directors Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Meyer, 1975. This documentary introduced the world to iconic hoarders Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, funhouse mirror images of their cousin, Jackie Onassis. Hermetic recluses in East Hampton, the Beales live in their own world. The vérité camera follows them everywhere, yet they are hardly mere subjects for the lens: the indomitable Little Edie especially emerges as a strong-willed independent figure in her own right, and her singular clothing style would make her something of a renowned fashionista.

Dec. 20 at 3 pm

Director Clint Eastwood, 1973. Kay Lenz plays a free-spirited teenage hippie who enters the life of a lonely, middle-aged divorcé (William Holden).

Dec. 20 at 6 pm

Dec. 21 at 5:15 pm

Director Richard Brooks, 1977, Diane Keaton, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, Tom Berenger, Richard Kiley, and Richard Gere. Based on a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner, this disturbing film about the sex life of a schoolteacher on the New York singles' scene gave Keaton one of her most complex roles. Her character, Theresa Dunn, spends most of her nights in bars, seeking intimate moments and hookups, trying to reconcile her desires with her conservative religious upbringing.

Dec. 21 at 3 pm

Jan. 4 at 1 pm 

Director Jack Hill. 1974, Pam Grier, Antonio Fargas, and Peter Brown. This Blaxploitation classic stars Grier as the take-no-prisoners title character, seeking vengeance against the drug-dealing thugs who killed her boyfriend.

Jan. 2 at 6:15 pm

Jan. 3 at 6 pm

Director Martin Scorsese, 1977, Robert De Niro, Liza Minnelli, and Lionel Stander. Scorsese's ode to classic MGM musicals and 1940s jazz marked a departure for him, combining his gritty hard-boiled realism with a celebration of Hollywood's surreal artificiality. The film depicts a difficult marriage between two independent creatives, a jazz singer and a saxophonist.

Jan. 3 at 3 pm

Jan. 4 at 5:15 pm

Director Sidney J. Furie, 1972, Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor. In her big screen debut, Ross plays jazz icon Billie Holiday in a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Based on Holiday's best-selling autobiography, the film charts her rise from a traumatic youth to a fledgling career, a fraught romance with her manager (Williams), eventual superstardom, and a derailing addiction.

Jan. 4 at 3 pm

Director Barbara Loden, 1970, Michael Higgens, Dorothy Shupenes, and Peter Shupenes. Loden plays an aimless divorced housewife and mother who relinquishes custody rights of her kids, and ends up an accomplice to an abusive petty thief with whom she has a one-night-stand.

All screenings take place in either the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room at Museum of the Moving Image at 36-01 35 Ave. in Astoria's Kaufman Arts District.