After nearly three decades of serving arthouse crowds in the greater St. Louis area, the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema will host its final screenings on February 23, according to an email sent to staff on February 14.
Opened in 1998, the Plaza Frontenac Cinema, part of Landmark Theatres, played host to a number of the best and most challenging arthouse and independent films as they made their way through St. Louis. It also served as a major hub for the St. Louis International Film Festival before Cinema St. Louis purchased the Hi-Pointe Theatre.
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The Plaza Frontenac Cinema also holds a special place in my heart as someone who writes about film in St. Louis. While I am not originally from St. Louis, I visited quite a bit growing up, and Plaza Frontenac Cinema was the first true arthouse indie theater I attended. On a birthday trip to St. Louis in 2010, shortly after I turned 16, my parents and I decided to go see The Ghost Writer, a twisty late-career thriller from director Roman Polanski starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan. I remember the thrill of getting to see a movie that almost certainly wasn’t going to play the multiplex in my hometown of Springfield, Illinois. On family trips to St. Louis over the next few years, a stop at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema was always a must.
In a way, seeing “art films” at a theater that served beer and wine in a fancy mall full of shiny luxury brands that were out of my price range felt like peeking behind the curtain at a grown-up world of culture—a world beyond the one I knew in my hometown.
When I eventually moved to St. Louis County after college, the Plaza Frontenac Cinema was a lifeline for catching the kinds of independent films I had frequented at Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri. Films like Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, or Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. After I moved to the city proper, I still made frequent pilgrimages to the Plaza Frontenac Cinema, often with a stop at Canyon Café for a few pre-movie drinks with friends. It was the first theater I returned to post-COVID lockdown, to see the Ed Helms and Patti Harrison vehicle Together, Together.
But in that intervening lockdown time, the theatrical landscape in St. Louis changed dramatically. While mainstay theaters such as the Tivoli and the Moolah shuttered, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in City Foundry and Arkadin Cinema & Bar rose up to fill the void. There was less of a reason for me to trek all the way out to Frontenac to see the latest Wes Anderson film.
It didn’t help that the conditions of the theater were clearly deteriorating. Rows were periodically closed off with buckets catching water falling from the ceiling, and the digital ticketing kiosk hadn’t worked in years. I caught a December screening of Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans in the biggest theater at Frontenac, only to find out the heat was out and the theater was 50 degrees.
Yes, the vibes had gotten increasingly cursed since my first visit in 2010, but there was something endearing about it, too. Each visit was like stepping inside a theater from a bygone era, when seemingly every mall worth its salt had a few screens tucked away inside. But I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when news broke in late 2024 that Plaza Frontenac was trying to evict the cinema, suing its parent company Silver Cinemas Acquisition Co. for $270,000 in back rent.
Even so, for all of its foibles and quirks, there’s still a sting that comes from losing an arthouse institution for St. Louis after nearly three decades. The theater no doubt had an impact on me, as well as countless other St. Louis cinephiles young and old. And while this indie lifeline in the county will soon be gone, thankfully there’s now a strong community of theaters in the city to pick up the mantle.
So, as the Plaza Frontenac Cinema prepares for its last week of programming, let’s raise a glass to another great St. Louis theater lost. May your projectors always shine brightly and your popcorn always be fresh.
