The ways in which the movie theater is romanticized can be incredibly familiar to many modern cinema lovers—or anyone who can recite the Nicole Kidman AMC commercial from memory. The smell of the popcorn, the respectful silence as the lights dim, the adrenaline of 100 people reacting to the same jump scare or joke in unison; the theatrical experience appeals to us as a place—a secular, but not necessarily unspiritual, temple—we are drawn to because of a unifying desire to be swept away.
The cinematic medium is littered with scenes set in movie theaters, self-contained moments in which a filmmaker pays homage to their formative years of silver-screen consumption. It’s a flexible location with a myriad of functions: tapping into a protagonist’s dreams, helping them waste time and forget the world outside, or just a savvy way of establishing a time and place. Although the archetypal movie-theater scene hones in on its threshold-crossing power—a child gazing up in awe and excitement—it has no rigid criteria or genre; it can be as eerie and invasive as it is moving and inspiring. It’s also a great way to include “Filmserts”, a term coined by Lewis Matheney, referring to the practice of directors inserting other people’s films into their own.
In the best movie-theater scenes, the physical world meets a spectacular, fantastical and artistic one, with the silver screen standing in for a window that characters can’t take their eyes off. The films below understand the spectrum of loneliness and comfort—and occasional chaos—promised by the movie theater.