Danny Leigh on magical places to watch films:
We’ll all have our own favourite movie houses, the ones that whether through splendour or squalor cast a spell on you even as you’re bumbling your way to your seat, then keep it in place once the main attraction is under way.
And yet there’s also a case for taking films out of the cinemas altogether — not on to our laptops, but into the properly scaled, communal world of screenings in the most unusual and offbeat spaces, all the techno-fetishism of the age of Avatar undercut by the relative ease with which a big screen with decent sound and picture can be rigged up for a grateful audience. …. Liberating movies from their conventional surroundings freshens up the very act of filmgoing — and with it whatever movie happens to be involved.
Summer films are a thing in New York City. These pop-up films take over the city where, side by side, strangers, friends, together, alone, no matter, blanketed, rubber-chaired, without, we pile into parks and onto rooftops to watch together films we’ve seen before. What’s memorable? Some of the finest outdoor, impromptu cinemas on the coast. The films are classic, I’m sure. But it’s the care those have taken to construct these summer moviehouses that we return to season after season.
