About the cinemas in this directory
The 683 venues listed above represent the working independent and art-house circuit in the United States as of this season. They include single-screen repertory houses, festival-affiliated cinemas, microcinemas in repurposed retail spaces, university-adjacent screening rooms, museum film programs, and small chains that have managed to stay genuinely independent. Major multiplex chains are deliberately excluded from this directory.
Cinema records are sourced from the OpenStreetMap amenity=cinema dataset, filtered against a chain blacklist, and supplemented with editorial research on venues we know are missing from OpenStreetMap's coverage. Every record carries an address, screen count, and city; many include phone numbers and geographic coordinates as well. Industry directories of indie exhibitors are a useful complementary reference if you are tracking venue closures or new openings. Annual reports from preservation foundations document which single-screen rooms have been saved and which have been lost in any given year.
If you operate a venue that should be on this list and isn't, see how to be added. If you are looking for venues in a specific city, the cities directory is faster than scrolling alphabetically by state.