There is something slightly irrational about the cinema. You leave your house, which contains a screen you have already paid for, and you travel — sometimes considerable distances — to sit in the dark with strangers, watching another screen.
The strangers are the point. Not because they enrich the experience through their presence — often they diminish it, with their phones and their wrappers and their commentary — but because they mark a kind of commitment. Everyone in that room made a decision. They left home.
At home, the film competes. It competes with the kitchen, with the phone, with the ambient hum of your own life continuing around it. At the cinema, the film wins by default. There is nothing else to do. The darkness is a contract.
This is why the best films — the ones that actually change something in you — tend to be the ones you saw in a cinema, in the dark, with strangers. Not because the resolution was better. Because you had nowhere to go.