The Roxie has been showing films on Sixteenth Street since 1912, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating cinemas in the United States and considerably older than most of the buildings around it. It has survived by becoming a nonprofit and by programming things nobody else will, and it is currently engaged in the least glamorous struggle available to a cultural institution: raising several million dollars to buy the building it has occupied for more than a century, so that a future landlord cannot end the story.
Two screens, short runs, and a programme that is different every few days. Ask Karpo what is playing this week and whether the film you want is on the big screen or the small one.
A century in one room
The cinema opened in the early 1910s and has been running, through various names and owners, more or less ever since. That continuity is rare enough to be genuinely remarkable, and it means the building carries a physical history that a restored picture palace does not quite replicate.
It is not grand. This is a modest neighbourhood cinema rather than a movie palace, and the interior reflects a hundred years of practical alterations rather than a single coherent design. That is part of the appeal, and it is also honest about what it is.
The nonprofit structure came later and is what has kept it viable. Ticket revenue alone has not sustained a small independent cinema in an expensive city for a long time, and the model here is membership, donation and programming that earns loyalty.
Two screens of very different sizes
The main auditorium seats a couple of hundred and is where the significant screenings happen — premieres, festival slots, the films with an audience behind them.
The second room is very much smaller, in the region of fifty seats, and it is used for shorter runs, second screenings and titles with a narrower appeal. It is an intimate space in the literal sense that you are close to everyone else in it.
The distinction matters when booking, because a sold-out show in the small room is a very different number of tickets from a sold-out show in the main one. Popular titles programmed into the small screen disappear quickly.
What it actually shows
Documentary is a genuine strength here, more so than at most repertory cinemas, and the programme carries a steady run of new documentary features that get little theatrical release elsewhere.
Alongside that sit independent narrative films, repertory and revival programming, and a significant amount of festival hosting. San Francisco has a dense festival calendar and this is one of the venues that carries it.
There is also a taste for the disreputable — genre series, midnight programming and things that are enjoyable rather than important. A cinema this old has no obligation to be solemn and it mostly is not.
Supporting it, if you want to
The building purchase campaign is the immediate context for everything the cinema is doing, and it is the sort of thing that either matters to you or does not. If it does, membership and donation are the mechanisms and they are prominently signposted.
The simpler form of support is buying a ticket to something you are not sure about. A cinema like this survives on the audience for the difficult Tuesday screening rather than on the sold-out Friday one, which is worth knowing when choosing a night.
Concessions matter more here than at a chain too, proportionally. It is a small thing and it is not nothing, at a venue where the margins are the difference between programming a risky film and not.
The Mission around it
Sixteenth Street is one of the busiest corridors in the Mission, dense with restaurants, bars and shops, and it runs at a genuinely high level of street activity late into the night. Coming out of a screening here is not coming out into a quiet street.
That density makes the cinema an easy component of an evening rather than the whole of it. Almost anything you want either side of the film is within a few minutes' walk, and it requires no forward planning at all.
The nearest station is on the same street a short walk away, which makes arriving and leaving without a car straightforward. Parking in the Mission is the usual difficult proposition and is not worth attempting for a two-hour film.
The one thing worth preparing for is that this is an old building doing an old job, and the comforts are those of 1912 rather than 2026. The seats are seats rather than recliners, the legroom is what it is, and the room can be warm when it is full. Anyone arriving expecting a premium format has misunderstood the proposition, and anyone arriving for the films will not care in the slightest.
Practical notes
Two screens of very different sizes. Check which one your film is in — the small room sells out fast.
Runs are short and the programme changes every few days. Check the specific week.
Documentary programming is a genuine strength here and gets a fuller run than almost anywhere else in the city.
It is a nonprofit raising funds to buy its own building. Membership and donation are the mechanisms if you want to help.
Buying a ticket to a quiet weeknight screening supports it more than a sold-out Friday does.
Sixteenth Street is busy late, so anything you want either side of the film is within a few minutes on foot.
The nearest station is a short walk along the same street. Do not attempt to park.
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Ask Karpo first
A programme that turns over every few days across two very different rooms. Ask Karpo what is on this week, which screen it is in, and whether there is anything left for the night you are free.
