The Best Regional Cinemas in Victoria Worth Travelling For

There are beautiful cinemas in Victoria, and then there are cinemas worth reorganising a weekend around. Across regional Victoria, old picture palaces, Art Deco theatres and wonderfully eccentric community-run screens are still flickering away, with red curtains, dress circles, handwritten signs, old projectors and volunteers who know half the people walking through the door.

There is the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine, the crimson-and-gold Regent in Ballarat, Charlton’s extraordinary 1930s Rex Theatre and tiny Swanpool Cinema, where the double feature never quite disappeared. Some are grand, others delightfully homespun, but all belong among the best regional cinemas in Victoria, and all make the multiplex back home feel a little dull by comparison.

Hop in the car, cue the road-trip playlist and make one of these regional cinemas your next destination.

Theatre Royal, Castlemaine

Castlemaine’s Theatre Royal has been entertaining crowds since the gold rush, first with live performance and, from 1919, silent films on screen. Today, the heritage-listed theatre still has one foot firmly in the present, pairing its 200-seat cinema with a pizzeria, bar and live-music program, while the film slate moves between new releases, arthouse picks, international cinema and beautifully chosen classics. It is the longest continuously operating theatre on mainland Australia, and somehow still feels like somewhere the whole town might end up on a Friday night.

30 Hargraves Street, Castlemaine

Palace Regent Ballarat, Ballarat

Ballarat built its Regent in 1928 with almost 2,000 seats, a scale that says plenty about how seriously country Victoria once took a night at the pictures. Nearly a century, one devastating fire and several incarnations later, the old movie palace is still showing films beneath its chandeliers, ornate plasterwork and enormous red curtain. Palace Cinemas revived the six-screen Regent in 2024, filling the program with blockbusters, international film festivals and arthouse releases.

Sitchu Tip: Get there early. The foyer deserves a little gawking before the lights go down.

49 Lydiard Street North, Ballarat Central

Rex Theatre, Charlton

The Rex opened in 1938 with A Star Is Born on the screen and bricks made on site by Charlton local Sam O’Brien, back when more than 600 people could squeeze inside and Saturday night meant half the town might be there. Television nearly finished it off, plans were once floated to turn it into shops and offices, and then locals stepped in, with long-time projectionist and farmer David Pollard helping steer the Rex into community ownership in 2007.

Then came the 2011 flood. More than a metre of water tore through the theatre, taking wiring, carpet, the piano, stage and downstairs seats with it; the old dress-circle seats upstairs survived. Volunteers rebuilt it. Today, those vintage seats are still there, the candy bar is staffed by locals and current films still roll through each week. Sit upstairs if you can. After everything this room has lived through, it seems only right.

30-34 High Street, Charlton

Roxy Theatre, Ouyen

Before Ouyen had the Roxy, Tuesday-night movies meant canvas deckchairs pulled up in front of a tin screen at an open-air theatre beside Cons Cafe. The permanent theatre arrived in 1936, built for fierce Mallee summers with lattice walls, roll-up blinds and sides that could be raised to catch a breeze. It closed in 1971, spent three decades hidden away as a plumbing warehouse, then Jenny Heaslip rallied more than 250 locals to bring it back, including school woodwork students replacing hundreds of timber slats and a local hardware salesman varnishing the floorboards and putting the ROXY sign back up. It reopened in 2007 and is still largely volunteer-run today, which feels exactly right for a cinema the town has already saved once.

19 Oke Street, Ouyen

Star Cinema, Eaglehawk

There is something wonderfully domestic about Eaglehawk’s Star Cinema. The film might be French and subtitled, but someone has put a knitted rug over the back of the couch in case your knees get cold. Movies first played inside the grand 1901 Town Hall in the early 20th century, before television emptied the room in the 1960s. Joan Rodger brought cinema back in 1999, swapping hard seats for cushioned chairs and securing a licence for wine and beer; when she retired, locals formed the Star Community Cinema Association and took over in 2005.

The original ticket box and projection room remain, but the auditorium now belongs to crimson sofas, little timber side tables, local wine and a revolving program of arthouse, international and classic films. Even the old Town Hall furniture has found its way into the mix.

Town Hall, Peg Leg Road, Eaglehawk

Swanpool Cinema, Swanpool

Swanpool Cinema feels inseparable from the town around it. Before the Memorial Hall even existed, locals screened 16mm films in St Aidan’s Hall to help pay for its construction; when the new hall opened in 1957, it had been built by volunteers using materials produced and milled locally. Decades later, Kevin Smith revived the cinema and ran it for 20 years with Shirley Swallow, whom he had met, wonderfully, at a film festival in Rosebud.

Today volunteers still work the ticket box, projection booth and candy bar, even making the choc tops, while Saturday and Sunday nights remain devoted to the double feature. The old 16mm, 35mm and carbon-arc projectors are still upstairs too, waiting whenever an old classic calls for them.

2386 Midland Highway, Swanpool

Regent Theatre, Yarram

Yarram’s Regent Theatre was built in 1930 by Margaret ‘Ma’ Thompson, a formidable local publican and developer who apparently had a young builder she was rather fond of and found him a very substantial project. Nearly a century later, the town is still looking after it. During one restoration, volunteers dismantled 312 dress-circle seats, reupholstered them, painted their cast-iron frames gold and screwed donor nameplates onto the backs; elsewhere, working bees punched some 40,000 nails into the auditorium floor before it could be sanded. Films still screen here, while upstairs The Mezz pours wine and hosts live music every Friday night, run, naturally, by another band of volunteers.

210 Commercial Road, Yarram

Astor Cinema, Ararat

When the Astor opened as the Midland Theatre in 1938, it held around 1,000 people, a staggering number for a country town and a reminder of just how central the cinema once was to regional life. Television did what television did, audiences thinned and the theatre eventually went dark, but Ararat kept finding ways to bring it back. In 1959 it was renamed the Astor; in the 1980s, after another closure, new owners spent heavily restoring the building, re-seating the auditorium and installing a vast new screen. The loveliest detail is hidden behind it: the original proscenium, old Cinemascope screen and red-and-gold velvet curtains are still there, preserved behind the modern set-up like a secret room from another era.

250 Barkly Street, Ararat

Paramount Theatre, Maryborough

Maryborough’s Paramount Theatre opened in 1926 with Graustark and The Silent Accuser, the latter starring a police dog who happened to be the only witness to a murder, which is a very good note on which to begin. The theatre gathered stories from there. On New Year’s Eve 1960, hundreds of children were kept inside during an afternoon matinee while a violent storm tore through town. Later came a stint as a school gym, then a slightly ramshackle cinema museum, before Helen and Gerard White took over and revived the place in 2017. Star Wars helped bring audiences back through the doors, and nearly a century after opening night, that grand Nolan Street façade is still doing what it always has: announcing that something is about to begin.

56 Nolan Street, Maryborough

Dromana 3 Drive-In, Dromana

Paul Whitaker was 14 when he started working at his family’s drive-in in 1975, stacking fridges and sneaking looks at the enormous screen between jobs; the Whitakers lived just behind the property, so the cinema was quite literally the backyard business. His father had opened it in 1962, when sound came through little speakers clipped to car windows and the single field could hold hundreds of cars. Paul eventually took over, wife Shelley opened the wonderfully kitsch Shel’s Diner, and more screens followed, including one rescued from the old Hoyts Altona drive-in. Sixty-odd years later, cars still nose uphill towards the screen, burgers arrive from the diner and movies play under the Peninsula night sky.

133 Nepean Highway, Dromana

Mansfield Armchair Cinema, Mansfield

When Mansfield’s old cinema closed in 2006, locals James and Catriona Wilson decided movie night was far too important to simply vanish from the calendar. Three years of fundraising, planning and stubbornness later, Mansfield Armchair Cinema opened as a not-for-profit community theatre, with sofas, recliners and enormous beanbags in place of regimented cinema seats. Local wine and cocktails arrive from Luna Bar next door, while secondary students work real shifts learning projection, front of house and everything in between. There is something rather lovely about a town rebuilding its cinema, then teaching its teenagers how to keep the lights on.

1 Chenery Street, Mansfield

Sun Cinema, Bright

Bright’s cinema is tiny by design: one screen, 62 seats and just enough room for an armchair, a glass of wine and two hours out of the weather. The old Cloud 9 cinema became part of the Sun Cinema family in 2020, keeping its intimate scale while widening the mix of films to include new releases, independent titles and international picks. It suits Bright particularly well in winter, when Gavan Street is wet, the mountains disappear behind low cloud and ducking into a warm little cinema suddenly becomes the best plan in town.

119 Gavan Street, Bright 

The Pivotonian Cinema, South Geelong

The Pivotonian began with a projectionist watching his trade disappear. Mark Walker had spent years threading film through machines in cinemas from Swan Hill to London when the industry switched abruptly to digital, so he and wife Jessica Litsas did the only reasonable thing and opened a cinema of their own. Their first version appeared in a vacant Ukrainian community hall in 2014, with a digital projector, orange deckchairs, sun loungers and old-school ADMIT ONE tickets. The six-month experiment refused to end. Crowdfunding followed, then a permanent 71-seat home in South Geelong, and today the program still carries the fingerprints of people who genuinely love film: MIFF screenings, director Q&As, international discoveries and titles that might otherwise never make it onto a Geelong screen.

Moorabool Street & 4 Verner Street, South Geelong

One old screen has a habit of leading to another. Keep the cultural detour going with Victoria’s best regional art galleries, from extraordinary new architecture to collections hidden in country towns, or head back towards the city and work your way through Melbourne’s best cinemas, where Art Deco ceilings, rooftop screens and neighbourhood movie houses keep the lights low and the choc tops cold.