There are more ways now to watch films than ever, but I still vastly prefer seeing them on the big screen, even if it means navigating rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles, where I now live. I am committed to the rituals of moviegoing: scrutinizing the new posters, cruising past the concessions, checking out the crowd (and exits), landing the perfect seat and savoring the delicious moment when the room darkens right before the screen lights up. In that instant, I always hope for the best and on occasion actually see it. Because even though I love moviegoing, I don’t love every movie.

But I always love thinking about films and puzzling through both how they work and how they work on us. It’s easy to understand why a drama about a dying parent can knock us sideways (or cause us to sneer at its cheap tricks). That little old lady onscreen may be your personal Proustian madeleine, tapping memories of your own mother. And if you drive a bit faster after seeing the latest “Fast & Furious” blowout (yes, I’ve done that) it may have to do with what the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese calls “mirror neurons,” the neural mechanism that fires in our brains when we perform an action and when we watch someone else perform one. The idea being that when Vin Diesel revs his engine, our brains react as if we’re gunning ours too.

Gallese asserts that we live in a “we-centric space,” which is a perfect metaphor for movie theaters and moviegoing. However films do their work — create their magic — they do so because of other people: making movies is a social act and so is moviegoing. And while you can watch them sitting alone on your couch (I regularly do although usually with a few cats), there is something qualitatively different about going to a designated space and sitting, and staying, in the enveloping dark with a lot of people you don’t know and maybe some you do. It is an exquisite, human thing to sit with all those other souls, to be alone with others.

With social distancing, quarantines and self-isolation, many of us are now physically alone. I am fervently hoping for the best for us all. When we at last can go out again and be with one another, I hope that we flood cinemas, watching every single movie, from the most rarefied art film to the silliest Hollywood offering. The movies can be exasperating and worse, but they have seen us through a lot, including economic bad times and wars. And there is nothing like watching a movie, leaving the world while being rooted in it alongside friends, family and everyone else. I miss that, I miss you.