Movies & Film

Hot Springs has two movie theatres:

Carmike Central City 10

      behind Central Station Flea Market at
      109 Higdon Ferry Road
      (501) 623-7751
      The Fandango website lists showtimes and sells tickets.

Behind the Mall Cinema

      behind Hot Springs Mall
      (501) 525-0883
      Behind the Mall Cinema website

Here's whats playing this week:

Carmike Central City 10:

Burn After Reading (R)
Proud American (PG)
Righteous Kill (R)
The Women (PG13)
Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys (PG13)
Disaster Movie (PG13)
Death Race (R)
Fly Me to the Moon 3D (G)
Tropic Thunder (R)
Bottle Shock (PG13)
The Dark Knight (PG13)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (PG)

Behind the Mall Cinema:

Ghost Town (PG13)
Lakeview Terrace (PG13)
Traitor (PG13)
Bangkok Dangerous (R )
The House Bunny (PG13)

Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute

Hot Springs is also home to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute. The HSDFI was founded in 1992, and its mission is "to provide unique educational and cultural opportunities, to advance the documentary genre as a meaningful art form, and to establish the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival as the premier documentary film festival in the world."

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute and its library of 17,000 films are housed in the old Malco Theater in downtown Hot Springs. Members of the HSDFI are working to completely restore the theater. (Read more on the Malco below.)

The HSDFI hosts the Hot Springs Documentary FIlm Festival each year in October.

Upcoming events include:
Spanish Film Festival - Sept 18-20
17th HS Documentary FIlm Festival - Oct 17-26

The Malco Theater

The Malco Theater in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas has quite a history. The site was originally home to a vaudeville theater called the Palace Theater. The Palace Theater was replaced with a Victorian-style Opera House in 1882, and the Opera House was in turn replaced by the Princess Theater in 1910. The Princess was destroyed by fire in 1935, and re-built as the Malco.

The Malco was one of the top theaters in Hot Springs for years. It was remodeled in 1966, and again in 1995 when it became the home of Maxwell Blade's Theatre of Magic. Maxwell Blade relocated in 2008 to free the theater for future renovations as home to the HS Documentary Film Institute.

There are rumors that the theater is haunted, apparantly by the ghost of a woman who was the victim of a magic trick gone horribly wrong. We found a website that tells the story.