New York City has long been one of the world’s great cities for film, not just because so many movies are made here but because so many movies are watched here. The independent theater scene that flourished from the 1960s onward gave generations of New Yorkers a film education that no university could match. Theaters in Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, Times Square, and across the bridge in Brooklyn screened everything from European art films to American underground experiments to the latest first-run releases. The culture that grew up around these screens still shapes how the city thinks about cinema today.

The Repertory Tradition

Repertory theaters, which program classic and international films alongside contemporary releases,