There’s a romance in the air that, until two years ago I hadn't felt in a long time. It was a rainy evening, just before 6pm, and I found myself staring at the clock in my kitchen, wondering if I’d actually go through with my New Year's resolution – to see a movie alone. All of Us Strangers was set to start at 6:30pm, and I could feel a tug of hesitation. But something nudged me to grab my car keys, and head towards the Ritz cinema.
There, in a velvet red seat with a bucket of popcorn and a choc-mint choc-top (the supreme flavour), I felt the excitement of what was to come. As the lights dimmed, I was swept away, drawn into the ache and honesty of the story unfolding on screen. Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott’s performances cut deep, and when The Power of Love played to announce the movie was at an end, it was as though every emotion I’d held in that week was released. Going to a movie alone isn’t necessarily the key to unlocking these moments, but it’s those vulnerable moments – like the ones I felt going on my own – that allow us to connect deeply.
Maybe it’s the dimming lights or the way each frame flickered with intention and passion. And since the world cracked back open post-COVID, I’ve found myself enamoured by films that feel more like living, breathing art pieces. They’re infused with a vulnerability, a deep sense of urgency that mirrors the fractures and fusions in our collective spirit. Each scene feels like it’s been sculpted with care, every line crafted to reach right down into some place we don’t often go. In this day and age, I’m convinced that cinema enhances life by giving us a space to see ourselves in ways that daily life doesn’t allow. Whether it be Backrooms, Disclosure Day, or The Drama, we all find something different in these films that they become a gallery for our most intimate thoughts and hopes, an exhibition of the present moment. And it's platforms like Letterboxd that give these discourses the ability to come into fruition.
Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan further bring this notion to life by only filming on the physical photochemical media of IMAX film. Well, at least since The Dark Knight in 2008. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Nolan described it has the most immersive medium; engulfing you into the cinematic universe you're watching.
"The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled," he said. "By shooting on IMAX 65mm film, you're really letting the screen disappear. You're getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You've got a huge screen and you're filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You're immersing them in the world of the film."
It's pure genius. While streaming services heavily compress the film to fit internet bandwidth that is typically 4K, an IMAX film negative contains far more information and detail than any home streaming service can reproduce. Only IMAX can translate the film with absolute precision, subtle colour gradients and texture that digital streaming cannot faithfully do. Like any art form, the medium is part of the message, the same way an oil painting can not be conveyed to it's true potential by looking at it on iPhone.
It’s also fascinating how, as a whole, cinema seems to be affecting us in new ways these days. And not just on the topics of nostalgia, the medium, but about cinema reclaiming its role as a cultural touchstone. That cinema can often be referred as a 'third space' – a place outside of work and home where we forge connections through shared narratives, much like how galleries and public art exhibits draw us in. Today, cinema is reclaiming that position as an emotional gathering ground, a setting that’s immediate, alive, and incredibly relevant. A friend of mine one shared how, after watching The Substance, she felt jolted out of a beauty-obsessed spiral, closing all her open tabs filled with beauty treatments. She said it was like a wake-up call, a reminder of the absurdity and raw truth of our ideals. It’s proof that our worries and realisations are shared by others, right there in the theatre seats beside us.
And this is how films can become more than stories, where they can be part of what cultural theorist Raymond Williams calls 'structures of feeling', which is shared moods or collective experiences that spread through society. We have felt this discourse in recent films like Leviticus and Die My Love, where they actively participate in our consciousness, and encourage us to process, reflect, and even heal as we connect with the films. This idea is what that draws me to fashion houses like CHANEL and Bottega Veneta for example, who are weaving narratives into their collections with an almost painterly precision like we haven't seen before. Rather than creating just clothes – they tell stories, capturing something of the human experience in fabric and silhouettes. In both cinema and fashion, there’s this shared spirit of transformation, to take stories of the everyday and reframe them as something extraordinary.
In writing this, I feel like I’m not just talking about movies or fashion, but about the way art moves us, to transport us somewhere we can only reach when we’re willing to sit still and truly listen. These days, those moments, are rare, that movies are some of the only ways to reach to us in such depth and capacity, where curiosity takes over.
And just maybe, they remind us of how vital it is to keep dreaming, to nurture those moments of possibility within us. Sometimes, it's not about searching for answers in them either, but about allowing the story to be what it is, to sink into it without needing it to reveal anything groundbreaking. Because at the heart of movies, that’s what keeps art alive – their evolution, their ability to stay with us, offering new perspectives as we change. Movies don't just reflect our world; they give us a reason to feel deeply, to believe in things unseen, and to carry a dream forward. It’s movies like the ones I listed above that inspire me to write, to capture in words just how back movies truly are.
Feature image: one
