Coral Gables Art Cinema

South Florida’s only nonprofit art-house cinema built from the ground up, Coral Gables Art Cinema opened in October 2010 out of a partnership between the City of Coral Gables and the Coral Gables Cinematheque, a nonprofit founded in 2006 by longtime film industry professional Steven Krams. The City and the Coral Gables Community Foundation’s Perrin Fund helped underwrite construction, and the project drew equipment donations from film industry companies along with financial support from Bacardi and Miami-Dade County, giving the theater at 260 Aragon Avenue an unusually institutional backing for what is, at its core, a single-screen operation devoted to films that would otherwise skip South Florida entirely.

The theater’s calendar mixes first-run and regional premieres of independent and international features, both fiction and documentary, with revivals of classics presented the way they were meant to be seen: on 35mm and, for select programs, rare 70mm prints, alongside standard digital projection. Recent restorations have included a 4K, 25th-anniversary presentation of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” and a run of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” the kind of programming that has earned the cinema repeat recognition, including a Best Movie Theater win in the Miami New Times’ 2025 Readers’ Choice poll.

Membership is central to how the cinema operates, with an After Hours membership tier offering access to late programming and other perks, and the venue also rents its screen and lobby for private events. The box office can be reached by phone at 786-472-2249, with a menu that routes callers to showtimes, ticketing, the member hotline, gift card purchases or rental inquiries, and general questions can go to hello@gablescinema.com. As is common for older single-screen theaters, accessibility has occasional hiccups: the elevator has been out of service periodically, meaning second-floor restrooms are reached by stairs during those stretches, so visitors with mobility needs may want to call ahead.

What sets Coral Gables Art Cinema apart from the multiplexes scattered around Miami-Dade isn’t just the format range, it’s the curation: a program built film by film around what deserves a theatrical run rather than what a distributor is pushing hardest that week. The theater is currently in the middle of an expansion campaign, a sign that the single-screen model still has room to grow nearly sixteen years after its 2010 opening. For a night out that isn’t dinner and a blockbuster, it remains one of the few Miami venues where a 35mm print is treated as the main event rather than a novelty.