2023, the year that cinema goes back to the future

Cinema is dealing with an existential crisis. To stream or not to stream, that is the question.

As this crisis plays out, directors are set on reminding us how wonderful the old movie experience used to be. A succession of big-screen films at the start of 2023 are so in thrall to the theatrical experience that they romanticise it all out of proportion.

Steven Spielberg’s brazenly autobiographical The Fabelmans is about a young man with a movie camera in suburban 60s America capturing his family and friends and wrestling with the truths the lens sometimes lays bare. Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light is set in a British seaside cinema in 1981, where the films they’re showing are Private Benjamin, Stir Crazy, Chariots of Fire and Being There. Again, this is all about the clunky love for reel changes and projectors, for foyer sweet and shafts of light. Damian Chazelle has already made an ode to the MGM musical in La La Land, and now returns with Babylon, a lengthy wallow in Hollywood excesses during the early days of movie-making.

Movies about making movies have long been a staple (Singin’ In The Rain is still in that Ten Greatest List), but something about their preponderance right now feels a little desperate. Watching movies on the big screen is a romantic and glamorous pursuit, even in a crumbling Margate fleapit, and certainly compared to plopping down on your sofa in front of streamed content. So why do I feel that each indulgent glorification is hitting not as a rallying cry, but as another nail in the coffin?