Illustration by Paul Donnellon.

Paul Donnellon, a BAFTA-nominated animator and director, invited me to two private feature film screenings in London’s Soho last week. He is the only man I know who can make every tropical fish in a giant fish-tank hot-swim it away from him the moment he enters a room. Give him a welcome mat, and his feet will have it in shreds within seconds. In truth, he’s a brilliant title designer for Universal, Fox, Warner and HBO, most recently Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s neo-noir Honey Don’t with Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza.

Being back in Soho brought to mind for me years of weekly screenings, when my children were young and I was mistaken for an expert in digital post-production. I often arranged previews of still to be finished films, typically in small dark rooms such as Mr Young’s Preview Theatre, now The Soho Screening Rooms. People still smoked back then. I remember the sound of the projector and cigarette smoke rising above heads, creating this endlessly appetising noirish atmosphere.

Godard’s maxim that “cinema is truth twenty-four times a second” still resonates: screenings in Soho embodied this paradoxical intimacy. That was exactly what it felt like in those half-lit rooms—truth refracted but sharper than daylight. The darkness of an auditorium was a peculiar privacy, shared yet personal. Sitting there, you are alone with your thoughts even as you breathe with strangers beside you.

I love that shift—from the racket of Wardour Street, couriers dodging taxis, pubs spilling conversations onto the pavement, into the........

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