The Top Events in Portland This Week, September 25–October 1, 2025
Local movie house Cinema 21 celebrates its centennial this week.
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It’s easy to marvel at Portland’s indie movie theaters. How cool is it that these places have stuck it out? you might ask a friend visiting town, cueing your polished trivia about inglorious roots as a porn theater, the leftover woodwork of a converted Masonic lodge, or the regal facade that could have only belonged to the Hollywood’s premier, 1,500-seat, organ-backed cathedral of silent film. But these theaters haven’t endured as artifacts. Portland is rich in celluloid dinosaurs because it uses them.
This week, one of the town’s best movie halls is celebrating its 100th birthday. Cinema 21 has gone by a few names since 1925, but whether called the State Theatre, Vista, 21st Avenue Theatre, or Cinema 21, it’s always been an excellent little indie. “You can’t include it in the same conversation as the places with 18 screens and bright lights and all that,” owner Tom Ranieri told Portland Monthly in 2022. “It’s kind of like church. There are no pews, but it has seats, a center of attention.” Preach.
Under Ranieri’s watch, Cinema 21 has become a kind of pulpit for local filmmakers. It’s where Wild premiered, and where Reese Witherspoon and Cheryl Strayed partied afterward. Miranda July, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond have all presented films there. Tommy Wiseau comes by to host weird screenings of The Room when he’s in town.
To celebrate its centennial, the theater programmed a week of movies that embody a sensibility honed over the past 100 years, showcasing what it calls “films that changed the way we see.” Things kicked off with a party last Friday, but screenings run through September 28 and include:
Sunday, the festival closes in classic Cinema 21 fashion. Anora director Sean Baker will host a screening of his 2015 movie Tangerine (4pm) and chat about the movie with film critic Shawn Levy after. Tangerine is remarkable for a few reasons, including its in-depth portrayal of a Los Angeles transgender sex worker (she’s seeking vengeance on her cheating boyfriend-slash-pimp) and because the movie was shot exclusively on iPhones. Despite the scrappy, modern filmmaking technique, Tangerine manages to align itself with the long tradition of movies: a perfect birthday crown for a theater devoted to both the past and the future.
More Things to Do This Week
BOOKS Mona Awad
7PM TUES, SEPT 30 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Awad’s 2019 novel Bunny hit a turbo-charged intersection of the zeitgeist, mixing a Heathers-inspired cult of what The New York Times recently called “manic-pixie trust-funders” with an occult twist on the dark academia genre. Bunny’s protagonist arrived at the MFA writing program of a New England Liberal Arts college and fell in with an It Girl foursome, who all call each other Bunny. We Love You, Bunny, Awad’s follow-up, is a continuation of the first book’s universe, but one in which the protagonist has written about her hostile “friends” and is now tied up—literally—as they decide what to do with her. Awad will chat about the book with the so-called “King of Weird Fiction” Jeff VanderMeer.
MUSIC Judy Collins
8PM SUN, SEPT 28 | ALADDIN THEATER, $50+
Collins, who’s 86, is no doubt one of the most celebrated folk singers working today. She’s known for original works and her inspired covers, like Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway ballad “Send in the Clowns.” (Her rendition of “Amazing Grace” is in the Library of Congress.) Peers returned the favor in 2008 with Born to the Breed: A Tribute to Judy Collins, a compilation album with covers by Rufus Wainwright, Dolly Parton, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and more. Remarkably, of Collins’s dozens of albums, Spellbound, which came out in 2022, is her first of entirely original songs. Less shocking is that she was once again nominated for a Grammy when it came out.
THEATER Primary Trust
PREVIEWS SEPT 28–OCT 2; OPENS OCT 3 | PORTLAND CENTER STAGE, $25+
After an inspiring fundraising push—one that’s far from over—Portland Center Stage opens its 2025–26 season with Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Set in a fictional suburb, the play zooms in on the small-town life of a Black bookseller whose best and only friend is imaginary, and whose world is upended when the shop shuts down. It’s a study of modern isolation and alienation, one informed but not overshadowed by the lead’s experience as a Black man. Directed by Chip Miller and starring Larry Owens (Search Party, High Maintenance), this local production is sure to enhance the relatively new play’s already immense reputation.
Elsewhere…
- Lindsay Costello’s dispatch from the Time-Based Art festival’s 30th annual go-around. NEA funding cuts had no chance of stopping the radical knitting installations, music made with chains and mallets and steps and railings, and operatic queering of telanovelas. (Portland Mercury)
- An interview with that radical knitting artist, Freddie Robins, around her ongoing show at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College. (Variable West)
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