Old-time theater owners reminisce about the heyday of the drive-in and confront the reality of a dying business. Laced with unusual archival trailers, the tone of the film swings between camp and nostalgia.

2024

Through booms and busts, Delft Theatres and its innovative gem The Nordic endured in Marquette, Michigan for almost 100 years. Bernie Rosendahl’s crusade to restore the historic arthouse to its former glory reveals a hidden cinema empire in the Upper Peninsula.
2024

In the land of axé music, old punks resist and live independently.
2024

This feature-length big screen documentary tells the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll repertory cinema which inspired a generation during Britain's turbulent Thatcher years.
2024

Your Cinema Needs You traces the origins of the Monarch Theatre, the rise and fall of its direct competitors, and its evolution in becoming Canada's oldest, surviving cinema since it first opened its doors on December 21, 1911.
2023

An independent documentary about the unprecedented struggles of movie theaters and the film industry as a whole during the COVID-19 pandemic
2023

Guillermo del Toro, Rian Johnson and other film luminaries look back at LA's historic Egyptian Theatre as it returns to its former movie palace glory.
2023

Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.
2023

In the heart of the Finnish forest, the long-closed foundry of the little town of Karkkila has come back to life thanks to director Aki Kaurismäki and his creation of the town's first cinema. The peace and calm of the little town of Karkkila, nestled deep in the Finnish forest, is interrupted by unexpected sounds. In the abandoned foundry, noisy building work is taking place. Inside the building, Aki Kaurismäki is both builder and site manager of what is soon to become the Kino Laika cinema. The creation of the cinema is the talk of the town. In the factory still in activity, in a 1960s Cadillac, in a bikers' club, in the local pub, in the woods or in Aki Kaurismäki's former editing room, people start talking about cinema again.
2023

ONLY IN THEATERS, a film by actor/director Raphael Sbarge, is an intimate and moving journey taken with the Laemmle family, spanning nearly three years of challenges, losses, and personal triumphs. Laemmle Theatres, the beloved 84-year-old arthouse cinema chain 3rd generation family business in Los Angeles, is facing seismic change and financial pressure. Yet the family behind this multigenerational business – whose sole mission has been to support the art of film – is determined to survive.
2022

An oral history exploring the development of film projection and cinema in Kingston-on-Thames - from resident innovator Eadweard Muybridge through the heyday, decline, and re-emergence of cinema. Features interviews with historians, projectionists and usherettes as well as cinema-goers with rare footage and images from Kingston’s cinemas.
2022

Inaugurated in 1930, the Capitol has been able to survive through 90 years of successive ownership by prestigious families such as the Namazies or the Shaw brothers, and today by Perennial Holdings, as well as of various historical, cultural and architectural vicissitudes, always reborn like a phoenix, thus mirroring not only the cinematic history of Singapore, but also reflecting the many cycles of change that the city went through.
2022

Celebrating the splendor and grandeur of the great cinemas of the United States, built when movies were the acme of entertainment and the stories were larger than life, as were the venues designed to show them. The film also tracks the eventual decline of the palaces, through to today’s current preservation efforts. A tribute to America’s great art form and the great monuments created for audiences to enjoy them in.
2019

Unable to purchase a $50,000 digital projector, a group of film fanatics in rural Pennsylvania fight to keep a dying drive-in theater alive by screening only vintage 35mm film prints and working entirely for free.
2017

In the excitement of the roaring 20s, a new kind of movie palace was constructed by the Bay. More than 90 years later, Tampa Theatre has become known as one of the most haunted buildings in the city, This Documentary uncovers the rich history and explores the unexplained events with a Team of Historians, Ghost Hunters and Staff.
2017

Built in 1942 by a maverick film preservationist, this small Los Angeles theater championed silent film at the very moment when the Hollywood studios across town were busily destroying their nitrate inventories. With hard chairs, phonograph-record accompaniments, and mostly original vintage prints, the dingy mom-and-pop operation was nonetheless a palace to the fanatical few who became its loyal audience.
2010

Jeff Towne revisited four years after the release of the original film.
2003
Paris, Latin Quarter. A small cinema that is both famous and marginal, Action Christine. The cashier has taken her camcorder and takes us to this public place, her workplace. Place of life, of passage, of meeting, a window open on the street, behind the hygienic phone, it is the daily life of the cashiers and the openers punctuated by the alternation of surging entrances and idle intersession.
1997

When Brooklyn's Kings Theater -- one of five "Wonder Theaters" in the New York area -- closed its doors in 1977, the neighborhood mourned. In a series of interviews, local aficionados of the palace as well as its projectionist, its organist, and former employees, reminisce about the Kings and its charmed days gone by.
1980

In the silent film era, movies were never really silent. In the background of films that made figures like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton into cultural icons, were the musical giants whose compositions defined the very films that captivated a generation of movie-goers. Arthur Kleiner converses with the still-living legends from that bygone golden age of cinema.
1976