Everyone’s Gone to the Movies

The New Yorker and the Times are serious institutions (combined operating years: 274); Screen Slate is the boisterous upstart, a lovingly anarchic website which launched in 2011—and has since become indispensable to cinephiles in New York City. What Screen Slate does is deceptively simple: It’s a listings website. On any day, you can find out about every repertory screening in New York, what’s playing at arthouse theaters, nonprofits, and other gallery and DIY spaces across the boroughs. (Programmers at multiple theaters told me the site helps bring younger audiences to their screenings.) Next to the requisite screening info are short essays and interviews. That’s the whole idea. It’s surprising that no one had done it before; it’s an even bigger marvel that it's been going, workmanlike, for nearly 15 years.

The site’s interview for No Fear No Die, written by regular contributor Steve Macfarlane, ran at nearly 4,000 words; a mainstream publication would never grant that much space to a story like that. Screen Slate is doing the work—passionately, shaggily, without reservation or anxiety about audience and advertising. In fact, there is no on-site advertising, no paywall, and there never will be.

Founded by Jon Dieringer from a place of obsessive necessity—he’d recently moved to New York and couldn’t believe there was no means to survey all the rep screening offerings in one place—Screen Slate captures the chaotic, diffuse energy of contemporary movie culture (while also guarding against its dumber instincts) better than any other publication. It is highbrow and lowbrow; esoteric and vulgar; conversant with YouTube and piracy. It covers pornography and experimental moving-image art. It is punk and confrontational, politically minded and forthright. In 2024 it published an open letter calling for the New York Film Festival to cease involvement with Bloomberg Philanthropies because the organization “is directly implicated in facilitating settlement infrastructure in the West Bank and denying Palestinians their basic rights.”

It has a strong sense of humor—it once programmed a series called “Kill Yr Landlords,” complete with illustrated zine (zines are a regular part of the offerings, along with some unique merch). It is operated by thoughtful cinephiles of the internet age who strive for accessibility; the 24-year-old managing editor Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is an NYU graduate who tries to purge “art speak” and other academic language from what they publish: “If you’re covering something that’s strange to most and on top of that the writer is incomprehensible, that’s no good for the movie.” Some of its staff have ties to high-profile studios and distributors (Dieringer works with A24, editing and consulting on books, zines, and Blu-ray releases; and former managing editor Maxwell Paparella now works for Mubi). Director Sean Baker and filmmaker Aaron Schimberg were early supporters. Giants of film criticism like Amy Taubin contribute. Brody submits his first favorite watches of the year there. It will never be acquired by Penske Media.

It has become such an integral part of theater-going in New York that, in 2019, the owner of the downtown theater Metrograph made an offer to buy it. Dieringer declined: “It didn’t feel like a good culture fit.”

Before Jesse Trussell lived in New York he read Screen Slate. A resident of Austin, Texas, Trussell went to the movies often and wanted to know what was happening in the epicenter of American cinephilia. Eventually he moved to the city and began working for the BAM, where he is currently the director of the nonprofit’s film program. When Screen Slate writes about a screening or series at BAM, he feels validated.

“There’s such an incredible community they’ve developed of people that are voracious and adventurous,” he said. By highlighting BAM’s programming, Screen Slates sends a message that this is “worth checking out. We definitely see a bump [in ticket sales].”

In his more than ten years at BAM, Trussell has watched publications that would have covered local cinema events, like The L Magazine or The Village Voice, contract and crumble into broken 404-ing archives or mutate into vestigial incarnations trading in AI slop about OnlyFans creators.

Emerging from this vacuum, Screen Slate has become crucial. Dennis Lim, the esteemed critic, programmer, and artistic director of the New York Film Festival, wrote over email that he can’t recall when he first became aware of Screen Slate, but he recognized its value: “I think many of us who participated in NYC film culture realized right away that it was an essential resource—something that filled the void left by the diminution and eventual shuttering of the alt-weeklies.”

Dieringer, 39 years old, likens running his website to Night of the Living Dead, specifically the hopeless task of protecting the farmhouse from the onslaught of zombies. Screen Slate is the farmhouse—a modest, beautifully utilitarian gathering place and outpost for civilization after the undead emerge to wreak havoc. Indeed, thanks to a redesign in 2015 from the graphic designer Bráulio Amado, it’s a pleasurable website to read, free of popups and banner ads. Adamdo’s visual gestures are few, like the dark arrow running down the left hand side of the page, guiding the reader to the showtimes.

“I think it’s funny,” Amado said, about his arrow. A veteran of Bloomberg Businessweek, Amado said that when Dieringer first contacted him, he explained that he’s not very good at web design (he is primarily a graphic designer and illustrator). But Dieringer prefers working with outsiders, amateurs, and misfits. Amado agreed to do it because he already read and loved the site. “It’s the first website I’d designed in a while and the last,” he told me.

Meanwhile, the zombies come in all shapes and sizes. Lousy advertising. Bad UX. Private equity. Google-optimized headlines. Film writing that’s little more than try-hard marketing copy. There are lots of ways for a website to go wrong, but Dieringer has managed to keep Screen Slate operating for nearly 15 years. The zombies haven’t forced their necrotic way past the humble wooden planks nailed across the doors and windows.

I’d argue the heart of Screen Slate is its daily newsletter; for regular filmgoers in New York, it’s an essential guide. Every day since February 13, 2011, Screen Slate has sent out an email with the New York rep screenings for that date and, usually, a short write-up on one of the notable pictures playing. (There is also a newsletter for San Francisco cinephiles.) “Not to be gross,” Dieringer said, “but I’ve probably sent the newsletter more times than I’ve brushed my teeth.” There are times when personal hygiene takes a backseat, but he never forgets to send the email to the 15,000 subscribers.

Born and raised in Canton, Ohio, Dieringer grew up within bicycling distance of a video store. Encountering the work of David Lynch as a teen turned the light on for him and when he happened on a copy of Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s canonical study of cult cinema Midnight Movies at a Borders, he become more curious about the medium’s experimental side: Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs. Like Jeffrey Beaumont finding the severed ear in an empty lot in his hometown, Midnight Movies helped wake Dieringer up to a world beyond Blockbuster and the local megaplex. “Thinking about these free, inclusive, audience-involved screenings was really exciting to me,” he said. “Hoberman writing about the obscenity charges against that group of filmmakers and curators for showing Flaming Creatures . . . that book is probably the thing that pointed me toward New York City in the long run.”

What drew him to Midnight Movies was the striking cover image of Jack Nance in Eraserhead, a movie Dieringer couldn’t for the life of him track down. With the advent of streaming, it is increasingly hard to recapture the feeling of a movie living in your head as a fantasy, conjured by the poster art and maybe a handful of reviews attesting to its strangeness, for years on end. Eventually Dieringer bought an Eraserhead “VHS bootleg with burned-in Japanese subtitles at a horror convention in a Holiday Inn near Cleveland.” It lived up to the hype.

This is an unprecedented time for awareness of, and access to, the dustiest, most neglected corners of film history. Letterboxd provides a social-media framework, not to mention a sense of competition amongst viewers, to seek out rare art, to be a completist for the most far-flung auteurs and subgenres. This does not mean, however, that we have returned to the 1960s, when film culture was culture, and Godard’s prolific provocations and Sontag’s criticism helped define what was cool and necessary for the intellectually curious. We’re awash in moving images, especially of the short-form variety. And though Harmony Korine may insist that a streamer like IShowSpeed is the new Tarkovsky, it’s unclear if film will ever again occupy the cultural epicenter. Hollywood, as you must know, is in a perpetual existential panic; in March, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, declared moviegoing dead.

One of the great assets of Screen Slate is that it has a clear, practical mandate—documenting what is screening in New York and San Francisco—which steers the publication clear of traps. It is not tied to the calendar of new releases. It’s not in the business of lists. It is not an attempt at building a new canon (though the writing does engage in reclamation), nor is it a compendium, like one of those VideoHound brick-sized books you may recall from the ’90s that rated films with full bones and half-bones. The success of Screen Slate as a publication lies in the application of its editorial point of view—that is, its taste—on an ever-shifting vector of culture in a specific place and time. Dieringer is an archivist and programmer himself, and takes seriously the task of creating a record of what’s being programmed where.

Recently Screen Slate copresented the series “Women, Workers, and Whores on Film” at Anthology Film Archives, guest programmed by the academic, artist, and filmmaker Ayanna Dozier. “I approached Jon because I appreciate what Screen Slate does with regards to community programming,” she said. “How they treat contributors and their support for people who pass through Screen Slate as writers or event organizers. I remember one of the first Screen Slate events I went to was a barbecue picnic in 2020. Creating spaces where people get to meet one another is really important for thinking about the reality of what it means to exist in a film community.”

Patrick Dahl, one of the most prolific contributors to the site and a lifelong friend of Dieringer, was raised inside a homespun video library. Possessed of mild hoarder tendencies, his mother dubbed movies off HBO and labeled each tape by hand. There were hundreds. “She loved hunks,” Dahl said, and her collection contained the work of Tom Cruise and Richard Gere, among other leading beefcakes. He moved through this library without any context; unlike the VHS boxes of the day, these tapes contained neither artwork nor summary; they bore only the titles written on the side in his mother’s sturdy cursive. He later found the American Film Institute’s canon and watched it with a bright student’s zeal. (Dahl’s day job is in preschool education.)

“Screen Slate is openhearted,” he offered; as a kid, he wanted an older brother to school him in what was cool and exciting, and had to settle on the work of critics like Ebert and Rosenbaum instead. He said he hopes that the site could be that older sibling for today’s budding cinephile.

Screen Slate’s capsule essays exist beyond evaluations of good or bad; they’re meant to focus interest and direct attention. Dahl wrote warmly about the 1995 Z-grade slasher movie Ice Cream Man, producing the lovely line, “It takes place entirely underneath the low ceiling of a pre-internet prepubescent’s morbid imagination, and that’s the source for much of its charm.” (When I reminded Dahl of the piece, he recalled watching it in high school with Dieringer and a friend of theirs at the time: “She’s now a white supremacist,” he said.)

“I wouldn’t say that Screen Slate offers a lot of film criticism, and I think Jon would agree with this,” Dozier told me. “I think its role is to offer film commentaries that allow audiences to become interested in films that may have been forgotten. These commentaries are incredibly rich and the writers synthesize these films to offer a nugget of perspective.” For her part, she’s written about pictures as varied as the Aaliyah vampire movie Queen of the Damned, the 1935 zombie feature Ouanga, and the experimental work of director Shu Lea Cheang. “I think of Screen Slate as a gateway drug to the world of film criticism,” she said.

Though it began as a strictly volunteer effort, Screen Slate pays its staff and contributors through nonprofit grants from the city and state, along with what money it brings in via Patreon and limited promotional emails paid for by select theaters. For the first ten years, Dieringer edited everything himself. Even now, with its band of contributors, the scrappiness of the operation enables its success. It can be uncompromising, which is in part why it’s good. It’s an argument for an uncluttered, utilitarian web experience in an age of AI hallucinations, affiliate links, and myriad sloppily written Substack accounts coming to you with their hands out.

I asked Dahl what motivated Dieringer to keep going, years into the process, even after he had hit multiple low points of exhaustion over its maintenance. Was it pride? Some sense of obligation?

Dahl thought about it. “It kept him in the center of things,” he said at last. “He’s built himself this prominent role in this world that he wanted to be a part of, and he did it without selling out.” He told me about a time in 2017 when the team was finishing proofing a zine about the Jackass franchise. Dieringer was at the hospital dealing with a family health event and the zine needed to go to the printer. “It would’ve been very understandable for him to check out,” Dahl said. “And he really wanted us to finish it without him.” But he didn’t. (Artforum later wrote about Jackass and the zine.)

Could the site live on without Dieringer? It’s not ridiculous to speculate that if the site were to shutter, there would be real material consequences for ticket sales in New York. The city needs Screen Slate, or something like it.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Dieringer said, of a succession plan for a future Screen Slate with a different leader. “I did it by myself for so many years and it feels very personal.”

“I would feel like an asshole [closing the site],” he said. “But I think it would suck if I wasn't involved. I think it could continue to exist in some form, but I think it would be a little dorkier.”

Someone’s got to look after the farmhouse.