Through her newsletter and this week’s Detroit New Wave event, Colleen Cirocco is bringing Detroit’s far-reaching movie culture together in one spot.
Adam GrahamThe Detroit News
Updated Aug. 26, 2026, 10:23 a.m. ET
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It’s a good time to be a film lover in Metro Detroit.
On Mondays, Motor City Cinema Society projects movies on 16mm film in Redford Township. On the weekends, the Detroit Film Theater shows world cinema selections, new and old, at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the second Thursday of every month, the Farmington Civic Theater holds secret cinema screenings, and once a month, Slimeball Cinerama hosts horror shlock nights at the Outer Limits Lounge in Hamtramck.
On any given night, there may be a showing of a classic movie or a cult favorite on a big screen in an old movie house, at a library, or in a bar. And that’s to say nothing of the first-run cinemas showing new titles (and sometimes older ones) in multiplexes from Southgate to Sterling Heights.
“There’s a new wave of energy and excitement about film in Detroit,” says Colleen Cirocco, who curates the Weekly Watchlist, a newsletter which compiles a comprehensive list of all the movie showings across Metro Detroit into one handy guide.
Now she’s taking the Weekly Watchlist concept a step further. Cirocco is hosting Detroit New Wave: The Rise of Cinema Culture in Metro Detroit, a symposium of sorts organized by Detroit’s Campire Film Cooperative, which will bring together independent cinema owners and programmers with audiences and filmmakers to discuss the recent boom of activity across the area’s movie spaces.
The series kicks off Thursday at The Congregation in Detroit, the first of three such gatherings of the city’s film-minded brain trust; follow-ups will be held Sept. 24 and Oct. 22.
The Detroit New Wave series “is creating a place for the people who are making it happen to gather,” says Cirocco, who started her newsletter two years ago and is closing in on the 1,000 subscribers mark on Substack. “They’re the focus, because they’re the ones who create the spaces for us to come to.”
The show must go on
That new energy Cirocco describes is part of a nationwide, post-pandemic surge of popularity of repertory screenings, or new showings of old movies.
And it comes as Metro Detroit has seen a rash of closings of some of its most beloved independent movie houses, including the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak in June 2021, Cinema Detroit in June 2023 and the Maple Theatre in Bloomfield Township in Feb. 2024, all of which were hubs of Detroit’s moviegoing community, more so than any individual multiplexes.
“When the Main Art closed, it was a real Come-to-Jesus moment for a lot of people where they realized, ‘I’ve gotta show up to these places, or these places are going to go away,'” says Lindsay Robillard, treasurer at the Senate Theater in Detroit.
The Senate is one of the places that has helped close the gap left by the shuttering of the Main, the Maple and Cinema Detroit. Robillard has seen attendance steadily climbing at the Senate, which shows a slate of classic film titles, and now averages more than 100 filmgoers per film screening, she says. That’s double what the theater was drawing a few years ago.
Last month at the Senate, a Friday night showing of “Maddie’s Secret” — which marked the first time the theater has shown a first-run movie since 1959 — drew 260 people, and a recent screening of “Dr. Strangelove” attracted “well over” 300 people, she says.
Viewers can of course watch “Dr. Strangelove” at any time at home. That’s not the point, or maybe it is the point: Cinema culture is created by individuals at theaters inside shared environments, not by streaming movies at home.
“People want to go see movies again,” says Frank Berman, a 45-year-old cinephile who lives in Farmington Hills and has a set routine of various film programs and secret cinema screenings he attends on a monthly basis.
“There’s a camaraderie that you don’t get when you stream something by yourself,” he says. “There’s communication, a sense of being with others, of doing something as one.”
Bringing life back to cinema
That doesn’t mean commercial theaters are out of the woods, and some area theaters and theater owners are struggling in the current environment. Earlier this month, the two-screen Romeo Theatre announced it would be closing in September, and the Historic Howell Theater is currently up for sale.
But then there’s the story of the Milford Independent Cinema, which after announcing its closure in January was saved by a community crowdfunding campaign. Reps from the Milford are scheduled to be a part of Thursday’s Detroit New Wave event.
Detroit New Wave will also have reps from Ann Arbor’s Michigan and State Theaters, along with reps from Club Cinephilia, a local female-focused film group, the Detroit Film Theatre, the Farmington Civic Theater, Slimeball Cinerama, the Historic Howell Theatre and Detroit’s Alger Theater.
At the Alger, on E. Warren on Detroit’s east side, volunteers are coming together with a plan to bring back the old movie house, which ran as a theater from 1935-1985. Theater organizers hope to begin doing screenings in nearby storefronts by early next year and hope to have the theater back up and running in 2028.
“With the interest in theaters and everything right now, this is the perfect time for us to bring the Alger back,” says Nick DiNatale, who is part of the team working to restore the Alger and bring it back to life.
DiNatale got involved with the local film community by attending screenings of classic films at the Redford Theatre, Detroit’s most consistent and long-running revival movie house, and at the Senate.
“When I was 24, 25 years old, I had very little interest in movies. But when I experienced the Redford and the Senate, I learned that moviegoing can be so much more than sitting in your living room and scrolling through streaming services,” says DiNatale, now 33. “People get dressed up, they go out, they make a night of it. It’s easy to get hooked on something when you see other people getting excited about it.”
DiNatale says he grew up assuming he didn’t like older movies, but seeing Buster Keaton films at the Redford, accompanied by live organ, opened his eyes. “It brings it alive,” he says.
“We’ll watch stuff like that at home, but it’s not quite as special. Seeing something projected on film, with someone up there in the booth changing the reels, it’s an art form all of its own. It’s not just someone hitting play. It’s something else that can make moviegoing really special.”
DiNatale is excited to be part of the Detroit New Wave series.
“I’m hoping to meet some of these other people who are doing theaters on whatever scale, hearing what works for them, what doesn’t work, and what their goals are,” DiNatale says.
Riding the New Wave
There are several overlapping reasons for the current explosion in rep screenings, says Bret Berg, the Los Angeles-based theatrical sales director for the American Genre Film Archive.
Among them: there is more access to film restorations than ever before, thanks to boutique physical media labels which specialize in unearthing and cleaning up movies that were previously super rare or hard to find; more spaces showing movies than ever before, thanks to a low barrier to entry into spaces; the COVID effect of people being forced to stay home and watch movies and either having a love of cinema foisted upon them, or having a previous love of cinema reignited; Letterboxd, the film-centric social media app, which allows movie lovers to share reviews and log films with others, which has gamified the practice of being a cinema lover; a loss of shopping malls, book stores, record stores and other places to go and hang out, which has made moviegoing something viable to do as a means just to get out of the house; and what Berg calls the “zero percent AI” factor, where movies are practical things that exist in the culture and are a way to escape the all-encompassing tyranny of AI.
All of that has contributed to a 300-400% rise in the number of microcinemas — small, independent spaces showing movies, which are typically not movie theaters — operating in the U.S. over the last few years, he says.
The sea change has also led to a shift in mentality among theater operators, Berg says.
“This was a business that was very closed off. It was isolationist; people were not interested in talking to or working with one another and competing for a smaller audience,” he says. Now? “It’s more like, ‘let’s loosen up and have some fun.'”
Berg spoke at this year’s Programmer’s Jam, a meeting of rep programmers, distributors, and revival exhibitors in Los Angeles, similar to the Detroit New Wave events. “It’s people in community, partnering or talking with each other. That did not happen before,” he says.
Berg says he wants the excitement around rep screenings and microcinemas to keep rising.
“I’m very hopeful it will keep growing and it’s not a bubble and people will keep going out to the movies,” he says.
A sense of community
Weekly Watchlist’s Cirocco experienced her cinematic awakening while attending screenings at the Motor City Cinema Society, which operates next door to the Redford Theatre. She started going to Motor City screenings three years ago.
“It felt like my first really deep dive into this world of film that I was starting to get into,” says Cirocco, 38, who grew up in Grosse Pointe Farms and now lives in Southwest Detroit. “It gave me so much more context. The talkbacks were really engaging, and it was so different from just watching a movie at home and then looking it up on Letterboxd.”
After the Motor City screenings, Cirocco started looking for more in-person screenings and finding them in stray corners of moviegoing culture in Metro Detroit, and she started compiling them into what was first a Slack post at work and eventually became her Weekly Watchlist newsletter, which she now spends her Sundays compiling.
Cirocco says she now goes to between one and five movies a week, and says she’s proud to have spun community out of what she once considered a solitary hobby.
“Knowing that I’m connecting people to fun, memorable experiences is what inspires this whole project,” she says, “and wanting to talk about movies endlessly.”
At the Detroit New Wave events, she hopes everyone in attendance gets something valuable out of the experience.
“What I hope for the audience is they learn about theaters they didn’t know about, and it makes them want to go,” she says. “And for the theater people, I’m interested in them learning from each other, about what works, what doesn’t work, and then feeling like they’re in a community and not competing against each other. If one person is succeeding, it can be good for everybody. So I want them to see each other as colleagues and equals, working together.”
The Senate’s Robillard is looking forward to learning from her peers, as well as area film lovers.
“I’m really interested in the audience Q&A, to learn what the most hardcore film fans and cinephiles in Detroit are excited about. And we need more opportunities to get everyone who’s doing film programming together to talk,” she says.
“It’s an opportunity to get together and learn from one another, to find out what’s working with the various business models. It will be cool to talk to folks who are doing bar film programming, and find out how they operate. And the Milford Cinema. What are your big lessons? How do you get people to work concessions, how are they managing volunteers, attracting new audiences, negotiating rights?”
All in all, it will be a place to share and collaborate and come together, all under the banner of loving film.
Says Robillard, “I’m really excited to build community amongst the doers.”
