Are You Watching a Movie? Or Is it Just Content?

Whenever a friend or colleague sees a movie before I do, the first question I ask is no longer “Is it any good?” but “Does it feel like a real movie?”

Everyone knows exactly what the question means, even if none of us can quite articulate it. The rise of streaming has eroded not just the moviegoing experience but also the hard-to-define qualities that have traditionally made a movie a movie. I’ve stopped counting the number of times a friend or acquaintance has said to me, “There’s so much to stream these days—I’d rather just stay at home.”  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But even if the theatrical experience sometimes appears to be dying, the movies are not. Young people and veteran filmmakers alike still want to make them. What is it that still draws them—and us—to the form? What makes some films feel real and others like sham products, worthy only of that derisive term content? This is all new territory. But it may help to look at some recent theatrical releases, as well as a few streaming-only products, to help discern what makes a film feel like a movie-movie today.

does a movie have to feel totally fresh? James Hawes’ The Amateur, with Rami Malek as a low-key CIA employee intent on avenging his wife’s death, is based on a 1981 Robert Littell thriller that has been adapted before. But it has a satisfying aura that seems to belong on the big screen. The action takes place in splashy locales like London and Paris, and the direction has a confident muscularity. We used to get sophisticated action-thrillers like this eight or nine times a year in the 1990s; now, a movie like The Amateur, watched on the big screen, can awaken a sense of something we’ve lost. It feels like a forgotten luxury.

But a work doesn’t necessarily have to play on the big screen to feel like a movie-movie. Conviction on the part of the filmmaker or the actors, or both, may be the deciding factor—it’s a “you know it when you see it” sort of thing. Netflix has bankrolled some terrific films over the years, from Roma to Maestro. But the Netflix Original The Electric State, a retro-futuristic fantasy directed by the Russo Brothers, released in mid-March via streaming only, achieves the dubious distinction of feeling slapdash and extravagant at once. Netflix spent some $300 million on it, yet even with its designed-to-look-cool robot-centric special effects, it barely feels worthy of even the smallest screen. But that doesn’t mean a direct-to-streaming entity can never feel like cinema. FX’s series Shogun is an example of TV that offers the kind of visual splendor we usually have to go to the movies for. Even for diehard movie people, cinematic TV can step in when the movies fall down on the job.

Read more: The Best Movies to Watch on Netflix Right Now

What about movies that become surprise hits? Do they work because they’re fun and well-made, or is the mechanism more mysterious than that? Lawrence Lamont’s bawdy buddy comedy One of Them Days—in which Keke Palmer and SZA play best friends who spend a crazy day trying to scrape together $1500 in rent money—opened in January and stayed in theaters for more than two months before shifting to Netflix in early April. Audiences loved it. But the film also plays beautifully on the small screen—it’s hilarious even when you’re watching alone. Let’s reverse-engineer that equation and consider Patricia Riggen’s action-adventure G20, from Amazon MGM Studios. Viola Davis plays the President of the United States, a war veteran who’s forced to dust off her combat skills when crypto-terrorists invade the G20 Summit in South Africa. Though the movie got only a streaming release, beginning April 10, Amazon did play it for small, select audiences a few days earlier, which is how I saw it. I can’t imagine enjoying this enthusiastically made but somewhat clumsy picture in my living room. But to watch Davis, a terrific actor who rarely gets the chance to let loose, crack a baddie over the head with a frying pan? The audience went nuts, and I did too. Sometimes the presence of other humans can turn a work into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Movie-movies don’t have to be extravagant or expensive. Earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh released Presence, a subtle but intensely effective supernatural thriller that cost about $2 million to make. Soderbergh’s elegant, sophisticated spy caper Black Bag, released a few months later, cost quite a bit more (roughly $50 million) and didn’t make its money back at the box office—but that’s no reflection on its quality. Now more than ever, the movie gods can be cruel.

And yet, even though the movie year is still young, we’ve already seen one example of a perfectly movielike movie. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners fulfills every promise of what a great mainstream movie can be, and several weeks after its release, it has the box-office returns to prove it. Sinners is gorgeous to look at, and though it comes laced with serious ideas, about race and community, it’s not hamstrung by them. It features both a big movie star, Michael B. Jordan, and an astonishing newcomer, Miles Caton, as a blues prodigy who’s invited to dance with the devil. And it’s about vampires—bloody, ruthless, charismatic vampires. There’s music, there’s steamy sex, there’s gore served up in a way that’s both artful and exhilarating. Sinners is the kind of movie that sends you home thinking, OK, I just saw something. You saw what a filmmaker can do with a possibility, a camera, a cast and crew. But maybe even more important, you became part of the almost mystical bond that a filmmaker can forge with an audience. In the moviegoing equation, you’re ingredient X. No movie is real without you.