As Britain’s galleries, museums, theatres and concert halls tentatively prepare to reopen in a few weeks’ time, our film critic reflects on the shared experience of cinema. Across our arts section, our critics reveal what they’ve missed most while the live arts have been in hibernation

What I’m most looking forward to when cinemas reopen is ­taking a comfortable seat in a packed auditorium as the chat and rustle dies down, the lights go out and the opening credits begin to roll. Watching a film at home on television can never match the absorption of settling in the warm darkness of a cinema ready to lose oneself in a story. On the big screen, even the heritage of such famous studio logos as the Paramount stars and mountain or the DreamWorks boy fishing from a crescent moon contribute to the expectant magic.

Not that rewatching old favourites and ­discovering various “B” movie classics on television hasn’t been a welcome distraction this past year – take a bow, Talking Pictures TV, a Freeview channel that has offered many ­little-known gems. Repeats on other channels of some of the formative movies of my youth have brought back almost visceral memories of going to the flicks at the local Elysian or Essoldo, and made me yearn to be allowed to return to our modern multiplex picture palaces.