This pint-size neighborhood playhouse is a welcome change from the typical multiplex. A cineaste’s delight, Lichtblick’s miniature screening room accommodates only two dozen red velvet seats, ensuring your trip to the movies will be the intimate and engrossing experience it was meant to be. Happily, most films are presented in their original language—avoiding the annoying dubbing that can be hard to avoid in larger German cinemas screening foreign releases.

The program leans heavily on retrospectives of directors, such as Godard and Fellini, who established the medium as we know it today, or turning points in film history such as Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, or the New Hollywood Movement. An ongoing series also presents works in which Berlin itself plays a leading role, and every Saturday at midnight Rick and Ilsa find and lose each other again in Casablanca.