The deepest film slate in town and an absolute shrine to the love of movies. Richard Linklater, Austin’s patron saint of indie cinema, founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 to screen the independent, experimental and foreign films Austin couldn’t otherwise see; three decades later AFS opened a physical location, a two-screen cinema in 2017. It’s the city’s only nonprofit arthouse: one screen runs new international and independent releases, the other is given over entirely to repertory — restorations, director retrospectives and series that run for weeks at a time. A third screen is currently under construction.

Homegrown icon: Austin’s gift to moviegoing. Tim and Karrie League opened the first Alamo in a Colorado Street parking garage in 1997 and rewrote what a cinema could be — food and drink at your seat, a no-talking policy that is actually enforced, and programming run by true cinephiles. The model spread nationwide, but it started here.

Five Austin locations now, and South Lamar remains the programming house.

Home to Terror Tuesday, Weird Wednesday, Master Pancake, 70mm, Video Vortex and Fantastic Fest.

The oldest theater in Austin, and it has never stopped working. It opened on Congress Avenue in 1915 as the Majestic. Vaudeville first: the Marx Brothers, Sarah Bernhardt, Sousa, and Houdini, whose 1916 levitation trick needed a hole cut in the ceiling that is still up there. Slated for demolition in the Seventies to make way for a Holiday Inn, until a group of Austinites bought it instead. Its Summer Classic Film Series has run every year since 1975 and reached its 52nd season this August. Closed through spring for its first major restoration in fifty years; programming has moved to the State and the Bullock.

The most immersive cinema experience in Texas. Six storeys of screen inside the state history museum, running dual 4K laser projectors — one of a handful of installations worldwide that can fill the full 1.43:1 frame, the tall, almost square shape an IMAX camera actually records. The room was purpose-built rather than converted: soundproofed, steeply raked, speakers placed for the space instead of fitted into it. The slate mixes Hollywood on the giant screen with nature documentaries and the Paramount’s classic series, so the same week can hold a Nolan release and a film about monarch butterflies.

The classiest way to see a film downtown. Austin’s arthouse since 2011, tucked into the Second Street District. Four small rooms — the largest seats about fifty — which makes it the most intimate cinema in the city and the one place where the front row is genuinely the good seat. Programming runs to independent, documentary and international, with the occasional 35mm booking alongside the wide releases worth seeing, and it holds smaller films for weeks after the multiplexes drop them. Reserved seating, a proper lobby bar you can carry a drink from, and four hours of validated parking in the garage next door — which downtown is close to a public service.

More than just a video store…

Don’t call it a comeback. They been here for years — with the esoteric collection of I Luv Video, reconstituted in the physical space of an old Vulcan Video.

Essentially a volunteer-run, nonprofit physical-media archive, lending library and film-club clubhouse disguised as an old-fashioned neighborhood video store. VHS, laserdisc, DVD, thousands of titles that exist on no service anywhere.

They also run a microcinema barely bigger than a living room, where members and guest programmers put on one-off screenings, and which you can rent for about what a round of drinks costs.

The most alive room in Austin cinema, and it barely looks like a cinema at all. A member-run nonprofit clubhouse on Chicon Street that programs what nobody else will and usually puts the artists in the room with the audience. Screenings share the calendar with live music, readings, zine launches and performance; guest programmers get handed the projector; tickets are usually a sliding scale, often around $8 to $15. Expect video art, regional horror, films that never got a distributor and the occasional canonical classic shown for the right reasons. Doors are usually half an hour before, and the crowd is the point as much as the film.

A multiplex that keeps turning up when it matters. Eleven screens at Highland, on the site of the old mall, with recliners and reserved seating and the wide-release slate you would expect. What earns it a place here is who it lets in: aGLIFF takes the building over for Big Queer Weekend, and it books family matinees, anniversary runs and titles the arthouses do not have room for. Not a repertory house, but the one commercial cinema in town that behaves like it wants to be part of the film community rather than adjacent to it.