Photograph by Tess Malone
At first, when I pulled into the parking lot of the newly reopened Tara Theatre for a Sunday screening, the 55-year-old theater seemingly hadn’t changed at all. The 1960s facade’s glittering lights still illuminated an otherwise generic Cheshire Bridge strip mall, finally lit after a seven-month closure. The Plaza Theatre’s owner, Chris Escobar, revived the Tara just in time for Memorial Day weekend, and I was excited to return to the place where I’d seen dozens of movies over the past decade, from obscure A24 indies to Oscar-winning dramas. But there was something off I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Then I figured it out—the outside ticket window was closed.
I opened the doors to reveal a spiffed-up, midcentury modern lobby that honored the theater’s 1968 origins. With green velvet couches and globe lights suspended from the ceiling, it could’ve been a Mad Men set—or my own living room. It felt like home for a film lover, with walls covered in posters for classics like Scenes from a Marriage and Full Metal Jacket. Decorated with old projectors and film gear, the lobby is almost a museum to the movie experience, and the theater does screen cinema favorites like Star Wars as well as recent arthouse releases. (Escobar plans to coordinate future programming alongside the Tara’s sister cinema in Poncey-Highland.) The Tara hadn’t changed at all really; it had just become more itself—but with tickets purchased at a concession stand that now serves Coca-Cola.
Photograph by Tess Malone
Photograph by Tess Malone
Preserving and expanding the Tara’s legacy was Escobar’s intention when he bought the theater this past winter. He first fell in love with it after attending the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival there a decade ago and knew it was something special. “I could tell this was a place of cinematic…
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