Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, film program

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, began showing films in 1939, according to the museum's film department. The first programs used prints supplied by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the museum asked local consulates for more. It showed first-run, archival, and repertory titles, and as Houston's taste for foreign films grew in the 1950s, the museum was the only place in the city to see them.

Film became a regular part of the museum's exhibition schedule in 1974, when a theater designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was completed. That year's expansion, paid for by a 1970 Brown Foundation gift, finished Mies's master plan for the museum, and the Brown Pavilion opened on January 14, 1974. The 350-seat Brown Auditorium Theater, built with what Houstonia calls stadium seating, now sits in the Caroline Wiess Law Building and is described as the oldest repertory cinema in Houston. It reopened after a full renovation in November 2000. A second room arrived with the Steven Holl-designed Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, which opened on November 21, 2020, with the 215-seat Lynn Wyatt Theater.

The department also works as a film distributor. After organizing the 1986 exhibition Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia and co-producing the first documentary about Frank with KUHT-TV, the museum took on the preservation and distribution of Frank's films and has since circulated them to hundreds of venues worldwide. Its yearly programs include Latin Wave, a festival of new Latin American films with visiting filmmakers that dates to 2007 and is organized with Fundación PROA of Buenos Aires, and Movies Houstonians Love, in which guests such as Barbara Bush, Bun B, Clyde Drexler, four Houston mayors, and Richard Linklater have introduced a favorite film; its 20th season opened in 2026. The museum also runs series such as Korean Film Nights and German Punk @50, a members' group called Film Buffs, and the closing premieres of Aurora Picture Show's youth filmmaking camps. Its grounds have appeared on screen as well: Terrence Malick filmed The Tree of Life there in 2008, and Richard Linklater's Boyhood has a scene among the sculptures near Mecom Fountain.