Maybe this is what craner is on about viz. the french mistaking film for literature?
I'd be interested in knowing what craner gets out of watching a film.
I respond to drama, even melodrama; I am not subtle. There is a range of extreme emotions that films exploit with ruthless precision or deceiving subtlety. The best do this with no qualms, or enjoy the tricks they play. I am a romantic and film is a romantic medium. I have a sadistic streak, and film is a theater of cruelty. My favorite films are Italian, and the Italians are the best at combining melodrama with violence.
I am visually inclined and the films I love tend to look rich, opulent, baroque (Bava, Argento, Powell & Pressburger, Josef von Sternberg, Vittorio Storaro, Shaw Brothers).
I like extreme portraits of the exceptional individual or the existential human condition, triumph or tragedy. A transcendent performance can live with you, define a condition or an era: Callas as Medea, Kaji as Scorpion, Marilyn in
Misfits, Dietrich directed by Sternberg, Sophia by de Sica, Calamai & Girotti in
Ossessione, Rogers & Astaire in full flow, Jack Hawkins cracking up in
The Cruel Sea, Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Lopez in
Hustlers. A performance like this can move the earth.
They create or recreate worlds that touch or border on reality and therefore enhance and heighten the world of everyday perception, like all art does. The combination of visual aesthetics, physical performance, ideas, themes: even something like
Avengers: Infinity War, one of the biggest-grossing films of all time, was a meditation on the ethics of genocide. This is not a passive thing. I prefer the old films, but the new ones can still help to shape the grand human narrative.
They are the perfect vessel for the primary human concerns: love, hate, sex, violence, freedom, fear. They channel something primal in packages that attack all the senses. You normally have to go to genre films to see how this is done most effectively which is why the Americans, Italians, Japanese and Chinese are the masters.
These are some of the things that I get out of films, just quickly off the top of my head.