News Reporter: Act Four: How to decide what to see in a theater and what to watch at home

Wednesday 29 November 2017

Act Four: How to decide what to see in a theater and what to watch at home

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Timothée Chalamet as Elio in "Call Me by Your Name." (Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Nov. 27 chat here, and submit questions for the Dec. 4 chat here. This week, a reader asks for help in figuring out which movies are worth an actual trip to the theater in the year-end rush.

How do you decide what movies to see in a theater vs. waiting for streaming/DVD? I saw “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” yesterday because it was rainy and I wanted to see a movie. I really liked it but realized that it was the only small, non-spectacle film that I had seen in a theater all year (unlike “Thor: Ragnarok,” “Wonder Woman,” “Baby Driver,” etc.). Do you find yourself opting to see certain types of films in the theater and waiting on “smaller” movies? Oscar season is approaching, so seeing something great before the awards may be one reason to look beyond “Star Wars: Last Jedi” in the next few weeks.

It’s worth noting up top that my decisions about which movies to see in theaters are made under a different set of conditions from most civilians. I don’t have to pay for the vast majority of movies I see, since I’m invited to free screenings for critics, and I’m allowed to go to those screenings as part of my workday, so I don’t have to decide whether a trip to the theater is a worthwhile use of my free time. (I also don’t have children, so I don’t have to figure out whether a movie is worth paying babysitting money to see in a theater.)

That said, your letter leads me to a point I badly want to emphasize: Just because a movie isn’t built around wild special effects or frenetic battle sequences doesn’t mean you should automatically assume that it makes sense to wait to watch it at home. Movies like “Call Me by Your Name” and “Mudbound” may not end with superheroes duking it out with computer-generated monsters, or include flashy car chases, but they were shot with considerable care, and they’re both completely beautiful films. It’s worth seeing them on a big screen because they’re lush and gorgeous; there’s a lot of cinematography in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” that I like, too, even though I wasn’t crazy about the movie as a whole. I’d actually argue that given how threadbare a lot of the special effects in some recent superhero movies have been, it might be better to save those for home rentals, where the flaws and patchwork will be less glaring and gigantic.

Go see movies that are likely to be beautiful and visually thoughtful on a big screen, and don’t let action spectacles be your sole determinant of “beautiful and visually thoughtful.” Some blockbusters will meet that standard. But not all will.