Last week, a touching moment with a stranger reminded me why I love attending the movies. I had just emerged from the darkness of the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney’s east, snot visibly dripping from my nose and my face blotchy-red.
A Great Dane had done this to me, or, more specifically, the Great Dane in The Friend, a lovelyadaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novelof the same name. Descending the stairs under the artificial lights of the cinema, I asked my friend if I “looked insane”.
She had spent the film gently rubbing me on the arm and at one point asking me if I was “OK to continue watching” as I sobbed in dramatic gasps, overwhelmed by the story of a woman developing a bond with the dog of her late friend, both of them wrapped in grief.
As my friend instructed me to get a tissue, a woman turned towards us, also sporting the blotchy-faced look, and told me she felt the same. We gushed at how much we had loved the movie and how prone we were to crying over dogs. As we shuffled into the street, I was moved by the feeling of connection we’d both felt – a shared experience between strangers.
When this year’s Sydney film festival draws to a close, I will have seen just under a dozen movies in a fortnight (thanks to a Flexipass that made it somewhat more affordable), dipping into stories from Ireland to Australia, France and Zambia.
It’s rare these days that I attend the cinema for new releases, so prone as I am to mindlessly scrolling through Netflix.
I’m not the only one. According to Screen Australia, cinema attendance has beenin steady declinefor decades. At first, an upsurge in video hire was to blame. Then the proliferation of streaming services arrived, coupled with aCovid-induced shutdown.
At its height, people would attend the cinema around 11 times a year in the early to mid-1990s. By 2023, it had dropped to just under five, and only 59% of Australians had visited the movies in the past year.
Globally, it’s a similar picture. According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, cinema ticket salesdropped 8.8% annually in 2024and were still about 30% below pre-Covid levels.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, it may not come as a huge surprise. The average price of a cinema ticket rose from $13.60 in 2014 to $17.26 in 2024according to Screen Australia, not to mention popcorn, drinks and transport.
Straight-to-streaminghas also become more common as the new iteration of direct-to-video, ushering hundreds of movies straight to the digital sphere without a run in the theatres.
But attending the movies has forced me to break free of my regular weeknight ritual to watch random reality television on my laptop in bed while simultaneously scrolling through my iPhone. And it has reignited my love of cinema.
There’s something special about spending two hours in a dark room, with no distractions, while sharing your reactions to a movie in real-time with strangers. In horror movies, I have screamed in unison with hundreds of people and burst into laughter at unexpected jump-reveals.
I have been moved by beautiful dialogue and cinematography in a way that is so easy to miss on a small screen without the temptation of my phone or the chatter of the outside world.
I often wonder if I have become a zombie to streaming services, enticed to watch yet another bad sitcom because I was tempted by the last one, or forced on to the bandwagon of the latest viral television show because it’s in the top 10 list.
With film festivals, and cinema programs more broadly, I get to take time to read about directors I may not have heard of, to curate my own experience based on my preferences – not those of thegreat algorithm in the sky.
In a world that has become so fractured and, at times, so lonely, I hope the magic of a plush red chair, the curtains unfurling and seeing the opening credits on a big screen is something we don’t take for granted.
Caitlin Cassidy is education reporter for Guardian Australia