There's nothing quite like seeing a movie on the big screen with epic sound and a comfy seat. Movies that emphasize scale and spectacle tend to especially benefit from being seen this way, making for a sometimes unforgettable experience.

What films were your greatest cinema experiences, and why?

Say what you want about the saturation or low art of superhero movies, they have provided some of the best communal theater experiences this century. Oh, to watch Spiderman 2, The Dark Knight, Avengers 1, Endgame, No Way Home, or Into the Spiderverse for the first time in a packed theater on opening night again...

Return of the King was pretty amazing as well. 

Seeing Jurassic Park in a theater for the first time, no one could believe that the dinosaurs looked that real.

I remember seeing it multiple times that summer and even like well into July when the movie had been out for a month, there were still selling out evening shows with lines down the street. 

Probably not expected but I'll list Titanic there too. Hearing people full on weeping in the theater was ... something. I also remember an entire family came out with grandparents and all and took up like an entire aisle. That movie was a phenomenon unlike anything else. 

Blade Runner 2049 is very impressive visually, and seeing that on the big screen made it even better.

Just touching in for a brief moment.

From my memory - various horror films: these are generally the best because you can feel the crowd participation, the tension, and so on.
In recent memory, the best experience was Conjuring 2, it gripped the crowd, lots of screams and so on.

Otherwise, from a grand spectacle:

Terminator 2 (James Cameron)
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg)
Independence Day (Roland Emerich)
Titanic (James Cameron)
Avatar (James Cameron)

Those 5 films all really blew my mind in the way films like 2001: A Space Odyssey must have done to people in the 1960s, or Fantasia or The Wizard of Oz. This was primarily because the experience was unlike anything else I’d seen before, and is difficult to replicate on the small screen. Of these 5 experiences - I’d probably put T2, Avatar, and Jurassic Park above the others… those three were massive turning points in cinema.

Jurassic Park was also the first movie I saw in the theater with surround sound. I'll never forget that first viewing, cinema packed full, everyone wildly looking behind them at certain parts lol. It was epic and at a time movies (in the Netherlands) still had a bathroom/snack break in between so you got to talk about the movie halfway through. I kinda miss that. Helped with people going in and out during the movie as well.

And yeah Titanic which I first saw in Tuschinski. The theater makes half the experience.

Second time I watched it in Imax which was actually less impressive, black box theater. 

Other greatest experiences were Terminator 2, Pulp Fiction, The Fifth Element (went 3 times, opera scene was a highlight in the cinema), Natural Born Killers (this needs a big screen with Oliver Stone's projection techniques), Twister (surround sound is made for this movie), Alien Resurrection, Sin city and the Matrix.

We watched the Matrix in NY, we flew there for the premiere of Star Wars The Phantom Menace. That didn't live up to the hype, then we went to see the Matrix without any expectations or prior knowledge, some sci-fi movie is all we knew. Mind blowing!

The 90s were peak cinema, only Sin City is from past 2000...

Interstellar was one of the great experiences as well. In Imax 70mm in Missisauga. It was a 40 minute drive to a boring theater though and only parts of the movie are actually filmed in 65mm. But the only way to experience the 1.43:1 IMAX ratio in full. Black bars under and above during the 35mm parts. (And half as sharp) But I can't put it next to my greatest experiences since the sound was much better at home :/

My favorite cinema experience was when I went to a theater on a early Monday morning

It was just my wife and I in the theater watching a movie

lmao

(I prefer watching movies at home because I dont like being around crowds at the theater due to loud cheering and whatnot).

Any movie on most weekday mornings (whether you're unemployed or simply just not working at that time of day) will typically be pretty empty. I've had periods of unemployment, part-time jobs, and second shift jobs so I have seen weekday screenings that were empty or near empty. 

Oh ya, it was on my off day and went to watch a movie after an appointment I had. 

It was great lol.

Funniest thing about it was the workers at the theater were looking at me weird for buying a ticket to a showing with just me and my wife.

I watched Requiem for a Dream alone in an old gothic theatre with just four other random
people spread out throughout this massive theatre. I wouldn’t have wanted to watch the film any other way. I didn’t have to worry about a friend not enjoying it and I was able to process it privately and quietly.

Dune Part 2, probably because I had read the book recently for the third time, made me cry almost the whole way through, particularly the Alia in the womb being flooded with pure spice scene. The sound design was brutal.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: Outside of the cinema (both the week before getting tickets and waiting in line the day of for seats) and for a brief moment when the Star Wars title (not really the crawl) in Phantom Menace was an experience I’ll never forget. Then my friend and I spent 14 hours straight bitching about how terrible was, but that’s neither here nor there.

And an odd one: Tomorrowland. I won’t bother with an explanation but I will say it kind of settled an argument I had been having all week with a long time friend of mine. I walked out of that movie with a determination that probably ultimately led to me creating the nonprofit I’ve been running for almost 10 years now.