01 Oct 2026

Minnesota’s Heights Theater Celebrates a Century in Business with a Weeklong Festival

Posted in Movies & Films, Shareminded By Ryan Sanderson On October 1, 2026

The Heights Theater in Columbia Heights is one of the oldest and most beautiful theaters in Minnesota. The auditorium hearkens back to the earliest days of cinema, complete with a Wurlitzer theater organ much like the ones that accompanied silent films. It screens a mix of new and classic cinema, including the annual April Hitchcock Festival celebrating the horror master as well as Silent Sundays, a monthly screening of silent films with organ accompaniment. It’s one of my favorite theaters in the Twin Cities.

And October 2026 marks a unique and impressive milestone for the theater—a full century in business. To commemorate the occasion, the Heights is offering the Heights Centennial Series: 11 films for each of the theater’s eleven unique decades, screening from Thursday, October 1, to Thursday, October 8.

A poster for the Heights Cinema Centennial, drawn like the famous portrait from The Shining with Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance at the center, alongside Harold Lloyd, Clint Eastwood, Clark Gable, and other stars from the films featured in the series.

Courtesy of the Heights Theater

Heights general manager Jeremy Marder said of the film choices, “I want people to experience the breadth of programming that the Heights offers: classics, noirs, silents, westerns, sci-fi, animation, foreign, and modern fare.”

The lineup features:

Safety Last! (Harold Lloyd, 1923)
It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, 1940)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The Matrix (Lana and Lily Wachowski, 1999)
Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002)
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022)

Marder added, “Every town used to have their neighborhood theater, a place of refuge that played the movies they wanted to see. More and more, we see those spaces either torn down or transformed into something outside of what their original design was. It is an honor to be a part of the Heights’ 100th continuous year.”

To learn more about the films and check out the full schedule, visit the Heights Theater website.