ScreenTimes is an independent directory of art-house, repertory, and indie cinemas across the United States. We catalog the venues that program outside the multiplex norm — single-screen rooms, festival houses, university screening series, microcinemas, museum-affiliated theaters, and the small chains that have managed to stay genuinely independent — and we publish their weekly schedules in a single browseable place.
Why this site exists
The American independent exhibition circuit has been losing venues for two decades, and the ones that remain are mostly invisible to algorithmic discovery. If you live in Brooklyn or Berkeley you probably already know which corner you walk to for a Wong Kar-wai retrospective. If you live in Boise, or you're visiting Asheville for a long weekend, or you have moved recently, there is no obvious place to find out which cinema in town is showing Past Lives on a Tuesday at seven. Mainstream listings sites prioritize the chains; algorithmic recommenders prioritize new releases. Repertory cinema in particular tends to fall through every crack.
We cover the cinemas, films, cities, and genres that those tools tend to miss. If a venue is independently operated, programs at least partly outside the new-wide-release rotation, and is open to the public, we want it in the directory.
Where the data comes from
Cinema venue data is drawn from the OpenStreetMap project (specifically the Overpass API query for amenity=cinema across the United States), filtered to remove the major chains, and supplemented with editorial research on venues we know are missing from the OpenStreetMap dataset. Film metadata is curated by hand — director, cast, runtime, language, country, genre, and a substantive plot summary for every title in the catalog. Showtimes are illustrative weekly schedules generated for directory navigation; for ticketing, always confirm with the venue directly.
What we don't do
We don't sell tickets, take a cut of bookings, or serve as a transaction layer. The directory exists so that you can find a cinema, and the cinema exists to be visited. Click through to the venue's own website, call them, walk in. The relationship between an independent cinema and its audience is the entire point.
Editorial standards
If a venue is genuinely independent and serves a public audience, we list it. We don't accept payment for placement and we don't differentiate cinemas by membership status. The order of cinemas on city pages is alphabetical; the order of films is by release year. Sponsored content, where it appears, is clearly labeled in our advertising slots and never mixed into editorial copy. Comparable editorial-policy statements from peer indie publications are a useful benchmark for any reader auditing our standards.
Get in touch
If you operate an indie cinema and want to be listed (or want a correction made), see our listing page. For press inquiries, see press. For everything else, the contact page is the right starting point. Background reading on the state of art-house exhibition is a useful supplement to this page.