Early in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller Tenet, a scientist (Clémence Poésy) demonstrates the film’s bizarre time travel gimmick for the nameless secret agent Protagonist (John David Washington). After a bullet rises off of a table into her hand as if dropped in reverse, she tells him, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Tenet was originally released in theaters in September 2020, when COVID-19 was rampant and sitting in a movie theater for two and a half hours was a dangerous and irresponsible prospect. Most Nolan fans who didn’t skip it experienced it first at home, no doubt to the filmmaker’s frustration. Nolan lobbied hard to preserve Tenet’s ill-timed theatrical release with a stubbornness that read, to many, as artistic vanity. But when watching Tenet on your television (probably with subtitles, given its overwhelming sound mix), it quickly becomes apparent why Nolan was so insistent that people experience the film in theaters. Through Poésy’s character, he delivers the audience clear instructions: Tenet is supposed to be felt, not understood, and the best place to feel a film is in a dark room with a massive screen, booming speakers, and a hundred people feeling it with you.

For one week, from February 23rd to March 1st, American filmgoers will get another, substantially less........

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