How Toronto's historic movie house is carrying film nostalgia into a new era of immersive cinema

By: The Lace Ledger Staff

There was a time when seeing a movie was a proper night on the town. You bought the ticket. Chose your seat. Sat among friends and strangers. The lights went down, and for the next two hours, everyone experienced the same thing at the same time.

Streaming has made film almost infinitely accessible, putting more than a century of cinema within reach from the comfort of our couch. But convenience changed our relationship with watching it. The destination disappeared. So did much of the anticipation, occasion and collective experience that once came with going to the movies.

At Toronto's Revue Cinema, those things are very much alive.

More than a century after audiences first began filing into the Roncesvalles theatre, the Revue has become a cinephile's paradise, with programming that stretches from cult oddities and filmmaker retrospectives to audience-participation screenings and Saturday mornings fuelled by classic cartoons and unlimited cereal.

The Revue isn't simply putting old movies back on the big screen. It's finding increasingly imaginative reasons for audiences to experience them together. Here, film history is something you participate in.