Movies on the Mall in Washington DC

One of the great summer events in Washington, DC is the annual "Screen on the Green" festival, showing classic movies outdoors on the National Mall, surrounded by the lighted monuments, in view of the glowing marble of the capitol buidling.

This year's festival runs Monday nights from July 20th to August 10th, and they're starting with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It should be utterly spectcular, given the big screen and the setting.

(For the uninitiated, the "mall" in Washington is a wide, tree-lined park that stretches from the capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, with the Washington Monument in the middle, and the lovely buildings of the Smithsonian Institution stretching along the sides. It's a glorious place.)

The National Mall at night/Getty Images