Tag: Plaza Theatre

Cinema Social, a monthly screening series from NPR-affiliate station WABE, tries to capture the community movie-watching experience again. The event, launched in February, is an expansion of one Lois Reitzes used to host for the station’s arts and culture program City Lights.

The 26th Atlanta Jewish Film Festival will unfold across the city between February 18 and March 3. Over the course of two weeks, the AJFF will screen 25 narrative features, 24 documentaries, and 16 short films from 20 different countries across the world. 

In the lobby of the Plaza Theatre is an analog photo booth from 1960 that shoots and develops printed photos, not digital, spitting out a strip of four images with the gritty, nostalgic charm of traditional printing. Only 200 of these functional analog photo booths are left in the world. The company Autophoto, founded by Georgia native Bre Conley Saxon, owns 24 operational booths, including three of the four booths in Atlanta.

The Plaza Theatre isn’t just a place to see a film: It is a cultural heartbeat, the kind of space where Atlanta’s weird and wonderful converge. The Plaza, honored as one of our “Best of Atlanta” entries in this issue, is one of the most venerable movie houses in the city—and its oldest. The Plaza’s art deco marquee is a landmark at the corner of Ponce de Leon and Highland avenues, and it’s always been the anchor tenant of Briarcliff Plaza.

Our 2025 Best of Atlanta picks for things to do—here's where you can workout, watch movies, enjoy the arts, catch a show, and more.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show—the 50-year-old satirical horror film based on the 1973 musical—is not only a cult classic, but also a cultural phenomenon. For the past 25 years, Lips Down on Dixie, a nonprofit theater organization, has had a shadow cast acting in tandem with the film every Friday night. LDOD is the oldest shadow cast in Atlanta and one of the city’s few majority-queer theater casts, with 90 percent of the cast and crew identifying as LGBTQ+.

Today, the fate of the silver screen is more imperiled than ever, but small cinemas like the Plaza seem to have found a formula for success. In fact, Atlanta’s independently owned theaters—which also include Tara Theatre, Starlight Drive-In, The Springs Cinema & Taphouse in Sandy Springs, and Aurora Cineplex in Roswell—are doing better than ever.

Ahead of a 30th anniversary screening of Alma’s Rainbow at the Plaza Theatre, we spoke with the filmmaker and former Spelman professor about joining the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and her work to portray the experiences of Black woman on screen.

True dive bars have become harder to find in our ever-gentrifying city, where $16 cocktails are being served at every cafe and movie theater. Fortunately, the original location of the Righteous Room has been a reliable dive for more than 25 years.

Movie theaters have famously struggled to get a streaming-obsessed audience out of their Cloud sofas and back into the multiplex—with the exception of Atlanta’s historic Plaza Theatre. Working alongside another bastion of Atlanta film culture, Videodrome, the Plaza has become a buzzing nexus of cinema since owner Chris Escobar took over in 2017. With the launch of “Plazadrome” collaborations in 2018, the film synergy has been off the charts.