Forty folding chairs

A film club in Garden City shows one old black and white Egyptian film each week, in a room with forty folding chairs. Ask the people leaving how it was and almost every answer is warm. Some of them have seen that film four times before.

A new release at a mall multiplex, playing on eight screens at once, gets a far colder reception. Half the row checks their phones. One person found it too long, another found it too slow, and a third only bought a ticket because the other film was sold out.

The club is not better at films. It is better at audiences.

Nobody wanders into a black and white film on a weeknight by accident. The people on those chairs arrived already wanting exactly what was on offer, so the club knows what it has to deliver and can deliver it without apology. Its promise is narrow enough to keep.

The multiplex has made a wider promise, to everyone in the building, and a wide promise lands in front of people who were never going to be pleased. They do not share the taste, they missed the point, or they came for something else entirely. Their disappointment is not really a judgement on the film. It is a judgement on how far the film was pushed.

This is the part most of us forget when we read our own reviews. A low score often describes who was let in, not what was made.

Making the specific thing is harder. It turns away people who would have paid. But the people who remain are the ones who came hoping to be satisfied, and so they usually are.