The Year I Fell Back In Love with Cinema, in 10 Moviegoing Experiences, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

It was in September, sitting in the big auditorium at BAM, packed with people, watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Near the beginning of the film is a shot of rain dropping into a pond, the water rippling out into green shards of wetland flora — nothing special, necessarily, but the kind of pastoral lyricism Tarkovsky routinely leaned on. But he holds on the shot just long enough, and watching it felt like a devotional experience. This was church. This was worship. And I was flush with the spirit.

I also almost forgot what that felt like. Moviegoing is encoded in my DNA. My earliest memory is squirming in my theater seat, my parents on either side, as Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis try eating each other’s faces during the sex scene in Top Gun. (I would have been 4 and a half years old.) Every other week, my brother and I would hit the multiplex during our Saturdays with Dad; the other weekends I was probably going to movies with friends. I drove to the theater to watch a film, clear my head, try to make sense of my world. I worked at a suburban multiplex. After moving to New York, I all but lived at Film Forum and BAM.

The movie theater was, is, and — as the last year made clear — will always be my happy place. But over the last decade or so, the connection frayed. Part of that was life. Work got tough, the world got tougher, I had a child, there was a pandemic. Part of that was also Hollywood. Superhero movies are fun for a while, but the mind needs more than the Avengers or Batman. The great big blockbusters and great mid-sized dramas that sustain a healthy cinema diet disappeared. I drifted away.

But in 2023, quite by accident, I went to the movies more than I had since 2011. I found myself going to a movie here and there and, before I knew it, I could feel the tug of that magnetic pull, so long dormant. I remembered what it was like, and why I went, and realized what I missed. It’s not just the movies; it’s seeing movies with real live humans.

Say what you want about the phones and the chatter and all that. Nothing beats being in a theater with a bunch of people experiencing the same film, laughing at the same jokes, gasping at the same twists, cheering at the same triumphs. Cinema is the most democratic art because it levels it all out. We’re in that room, together, most of us strangers, sharing this space and experience and, hopefully, walking out, together, fuller and more tuned in to our world than before.

So many people in positions of power want to keep us segregated, sequestered, and streaming alone. But to lose movie theaters would be to lose something essential, not just a necessary third place, as Robert (Bowling Alone) Putnam would call it, but a necessary place, period. I knew that before, but the past year hardened my conviction. I’m a born-again moviegoer, and like those most zealous of all believers I will go to the barricades for this art and this experience.

In that spirit, rather than collate yet another top 10 list I’m sharing the 10 best moviegoing experiences I had in 2023. Hopefully, something here will connect in a way that gets you back out to the movies in the new year.

(But if you really want a 2023 top 10, in alphabetical order: 65, American Fiction, Asteroid City, Barbie, Fallen Leaves, The Holdovers, The Boy and the Heron, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Perfect Days.)

My Neighbor Totoro (January 4, Metrograph)

One of my 5-year-old daughter’s favorite movies is My Neighbor Totoro, so I jumped on tickets to see it on Metrograph’s largest screen. When it started, we realized it was subtitled, not dubbed. Not ideal for a child who can’t yet read. But when I asked her if she was OK with it being in Japanese, she simply said, “Yep,” and locked into the film. It helped that she knew the movie so well, but still, I was one proud dad.

Nashville (April 15, Metrograph)

The best seat in any house in New York is Metrograph’s balcony. Besides being a balcony — in desperately short supply in this or any city — it puts you at the ideal eye level (and headspace) for a movie. That’s especially true if you’re catching a classic. I hadn’t fully appreciated that fact until watching Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville, and now every other viewing of it will compete with the Metrograph experience.

Oppenheimer (August 1, AMC Lincoln Square)

There are only 30 IMAX 70mm theaters in the world; 19 are in the U.S.; one is in New York, at the AMC Lincoln Square. There was no way I wasn’t seeing Oppenheimer — shot in IMAX 70 — in its native format. The realization that my old-man knees can’t handle three-plus hours in a cramped IMAX theater seat aside, this was as good as moviegoing gets: big, immersive, total cinema. The standout was the new black-and-white film stock Kodak developed for the film: so crisp, so pure. (There wasn’t one that could handle what director Christopher Nolan wanted by shooting IMAX.) But the whole thing was worth the hype — and schedule management.

The Hairy Bird (August 11, Metrograph)

It’s not often you experience a resurrection at a movie theater. But that’s what happened the night Metrograph screened Sarah Kernochan’s 1998 coming-of-age 1960’s-set boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (a/k/a All I Wanna Do, a/k/a Strike!). The film stars Kirsten Dunst and Rachael Leigh Cook just as they became huge stars, and boasts a loaded supporting cast that includes Lynn Redgrave, Gaby Hoffmann, Vincent Kartheiser, and Heather Matarazzo. And no one saw it. Because legendary scumbag Harvey Weinstein acquired it, then buried it for… reasons. Kernochan emptied her bank account to secure a one-screen, one-week release in New York, but it was otherwise dumped onto home video. A Metrograph programmer, who discovered it on VHS, secured a 35mm print to screen at the theater. Kernochan, producer Peter Newman, and cinematographer Tony Janelli were there to talk about the film — and experience a sold-out crowd belatedly fall in love with their hilarious, pitch perfect film. It was a long overdue victory lap for Kernochan, who was overcome with emotion. “I never got to have this experience,” she said, choking back tears. It was hard not to be overcome, too, as an audience member, cheering this filmmaker and her work and helping her reclaim some of what was stolen from her.

Winter Kills (August 16, Film Forum)

Nearly every scene in William Richert’s gonzo 1979 pitch-black-satire adaptation of Richard Condon’s JFK-assassination-conspiracy thriller novel has an I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing moment. Seventysomething John Huston in a silk robe and red bikini briefs. Jeff Bridges in the loudest, most uncomfortable sex scene ever. Huston imploring son Bridges to return a pair of brass knuckles because they have “sentimental value.” (Honestly, anytime Huston is on screen, pay attention.) Elizabeth Taylor sauntering into the film for an uncredited cameo. “Expect anything” should be the film’s tagline. That goes for watching it, too. When Taylor shows up, a guy sitting two seats away stretches over, slaps me on the arm, and says, “Know who that is?!” (Uh, yeah. And please don’t touch me.) A lifetime of moviegoing and that had never happened. It takes a special kind of film to make someone actively engage a total stranger, in the dark, in a fit of Liz Taylor fanboy excitement. And it could only happen in a movie theater.

Solaris (September 1, BAM)

I touched on this in the introduction, but seeing Solaris on a giant screen with a full crowd of rapt cinephiles was the first time (that I can remember) of moviegoing existing for me as something like churchgoing. It’s a rare experience that I’ll chase for the rest of my days.

Perfect Days (September 27, IFC Film Center)

There’s not much to Wim Wenders’ film, plot-wise: middle-aged Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) in Tokyo wakes up in his spartan apartment, goes through his morning routine, jumps in his van, pops on a cassette, and heads to work cleaning the city’s public toilets. Others come and go — a co-worker; Hirayama’s niece; his estranged sister — and they each wobble the delicate equilibrium of Hirayama’s existence. We learn little about his life before these few days we spend with him, and at the end there’s not so much resolution as an expansion of what constitutes living. It’s a humane film that hit me between the eyes. There’s rarely a day that goes by since seeing Perfect Days that I haven’t thought about it or felt it resonate in my material, corporeal, and spiritual life. This is art built for the publicly private introspection and empathy that comes from watching a film with others in a dark theater.

The World’s Greatest Sinner (October 7, Anthology Film Archives)

It’s easy to forget that not everything is available via streaming, or that it ever will be. Some stuff is just too weird or niche or marginal to make the investment worth it for Netflix or Amazon. Sometimes you need to leave the house and experience a film in a theater or it’s gone forever. The World’s Greatest Sinner, from 1962, is just such a film, a truly wild piece of folk filmmaking from ur-character actor Timothy Carey, who wrote, directed, and starred in what I can only describe as a live-action version of one of those pocket-sized arch-religious mini comic books you find in Port Authority bathrooms. (They’re called Chick tracts, FYI.) An insurance salesman has the mother of all midlife crises, rejects his sleepy suburban life, calls himself God, starts a cult, swells his ranks via rock ’n roll revivals, turns the cult into a fascistic political machine, and gets close to taking total control before being zapped by the righteousness of actual God’s light. It is insane in all the right ways, and insanely prophetic in others. A rally goes off the rails and fake-God’s acolytes storm an arena in a scene that eerily parallels the January 6 insurrection. Sinner should only exist as a beat-up bootleg, yet the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences restored the film and Anthology, bless them, screened it. Seeing it with a bunch of other weirdos on the same wavelength was just the best kind of time at the movies.

The Holdovers (October 27, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn) and American Fiction (December 15, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn)

In another time — say, 20 years ago — it wouldn’t be noteworthy to see two mid-budget grown-up dramedies in a movie theater. But this was 2023, when those kinds of films, which rarely get made, go direct to streaming. And somehow we got The Holdovers and American Fiction, remarkable works that might be miracles. The former, an original script directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, is a ‘70s-set New England boarding school buddy movie that feels like a long-lost Hal Ashby work. For the latter, Cord Jefferson adapted Percival Everett’s novel Erasure into a razor-sharp satire on the warping influence of white “allies” on popular culture, anchored by a career-best performance from Jeffery Wright. Both are expertly crafted, confident films that showcase great writing and direction, better acting, and a respect for their audiences. They don’t make ‘em like they used to — but, clearly, they could!

The Abyss: Special Edition (December 8, Metrograph)

Back to the Metrograph balcony for the hinge point of James Cameron’s career, The Abyss, a kind of blue-collar 2001 but under water. (2001 Leagues Under the Sea?) It’s a film I’d never seen, and there was no better way to rectify that than with a screening of Cameron’s 4K restoration of his director’s cut. Wow. It was like discovering a skeleton key to more than a decade of big-budget action movies. The DNA of everything from Terminator 2 to Independence Day to Armageddon was there — except in a decidedly less cynical form than most of Hollywood’s 1990s flickbait. Seeing The Abyss on that large screen was something special.