ONCE upon a time those of us who considered ourselves “cinephiles” insisted on using the word “film” as evidence of the degree of our aesthetic discernment over those who herded themselves into multiplexes to watch mere “movies,” connoting the slop entertainment dished out weekly by Hollywood — even though our own cinematic heroes, Jean-Pierre  Melville, Andrzej Wajda, Jean-Luc Godard, Lina Wertmuller, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini, all adored and reworked Hollywood’s slop. Pretence rarely pays attention to the law of consistency.

But do these highbrow distinctions have any meaning anymore? Are there even “films” now?

Fortunately, there’s still Film Comment, a safe space for lofty talk about the current “cinema.” There are even a few holdout directors who insist on shooting on film and having their films run through actual projectors and shown on large, arced screens before live audiences.

But they’re mostly insufferable filmmakers — Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Ridley Scott — whose films are artistically attenuated, their visions much smaller than the screens they’re projected on.

The last film I saw in a cinema was Tarantino’s bloated, self-infatuated and nasty Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and, as so often with his movies, it was the soundtrack that kept me from hitting the exit after the first hour.

The last “film” that rewarded the hassle of getting to the “cinema” was an immaculately restored copy of Barry Lyndon — empty, but sumptuous — shown in a less-than-immaculately restored old movie palace (but no worse for that).

The film, like most of Stanley Kubrick’s work, was a financial flop. It’s something of a mystery to me as to how Kubrick kept raising money to make expensive visual feasts that were commercial failures. More power to him.

But after Barry Lyndon the big screens were commandeered by even emptier, much less sumptuous films made by a pair of his young acolytes, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who knew how to make the big screens pay even if they didn’t know (or care) how to make them say anything.

Do I miss the social experience of watching a film in the dark with other anonymous members of our community, plunging into a collective dreamscape? Not really.

Today’s Hollywood auteurs are algorithms developing plot lines culled from data-mining the obsessions of 16-year-olds from four years ago, when the movies went into production, with all the aesthetic efficacy of a flu shot based on a four-year old virus.

The cinema experience itself isn’t what it once was. Instead of a seduction of the sense, they’re more like an assault. We used to go the movies to get away from commercials, now we’re bombarded by them, bound in our seats, forced to watch advertisements for cars and previews of movies (often hard to distinguish between the two), like Alex at the end of Clockwork Orange.

The near constant chatter and fidgeting inside today’s cinemas is probably a sign of how boring and predictable most cinematic fare has become.

Thankfully most cinemas now have Barcalounger-style seats, which certainly makes it easier to fall comfortably asleep between chase scenes and bang-bang, though some movie goers should be encouraged to bring their CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines so that their porcine inhalations don’t wake the rest of us up.

It’s impertinent that directors like Nolan are trying to dictate how their grossly over-budgeted films (many financed by oil sheiks) should be shown and where they should be watched.

This is, shall we say, directatorial behaviour and it indicates just how deeply mired they remain in an outdated system that no-one is really that nostalgic to recreate. This kind of encrusted thinking mediates against the possibilities of the medium itself.

The new cinema is happening outside the entropic confines of these boxes, where you’re hit up for cash at every turn and cashiered for bringing your own water bottles. Enough.

I recall an interview Godard gave more than a decade ago now, when he predicted that the iPhone was the future of cinema, a single hand-held device with which you could film, edit, distribute, and watch movies, while jettisoning the producers, censors, distributors, syndicators and multiplexes.

Who needs CGI’d special effects when the world is blowing up, burning out and melting down, all around us? The footage from hundreds of BLM protests have fulfilled Godard’s prophecy.

Film-making and film-watching have never been more democratic, more decentralised, cut off from those who would control what we watch and when and how we watch it.

We’ve been liberated, as Michel Foucault might have argued, by our confinement. In our imposed isolation and exclusion, movie-watching has become a more inclusive, shared, and international experience, with new films crossing borders and oceans faster than the latest viral mutations.

But capitalism is catching up fast. The walls of the new political economy of film are once again closing in on us, trying box us in, herd us back through its turnstiles, metal and virtual.

It is our task to refuse this new enclosure movement and to demand a cinema that is open and free of such constraints, a cinema that is turned outward onto the world around us.

In that spirit, I offer a sampling of the, yes, let’s call them “movies” that forged a few cracks in the walls for me during year two of the plague that came and stayed.

Jeffrey St Clair is editor of CounterPunch where this article first appeared. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.