I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW. Calling a cinema a fleapit is not the most generous of compliments to pay the source of so many of our most treasured memories, but please bear with.

In those nigh-on unimaginable days before TV so brusquely usurped it as the planet’s most popular screen, cinemas were called any number of things, even ‘theaters’ (as, somewhat perversely, they still are in the US, as if nobody could be bothered to invent something more distinctive). The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists no fewer than 28 synonyms for ‘cinema’, from nickelodeon to grind house, among which linger other such anachronisms as fleapit. This British coinage was designed to convey a rather grubby, not to say sneering sense of the oiks who began cramming in to watch the Pathé and Gaumont newsreels when they were launched in 1910.

Smoking might have been permissible for most of the rest of the century, but comfort was low down the list of the owners’ priorities – unless, that is, you were lucky enough, say, to be familiar with The Tuschinski just off Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam, which opened in 1921 and remains an outstanding monument to the art of building picture palaces.

Together with his brothers-in-law, Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich, Abraham Tuschinski, a Rotterdammer who already owned four fleapits in his home city, had decided the time was ripe to open something altogether grander in Amsterdam. The stunningly sumptuous art deco construction took more than two years, but it was worth it.

Incorporating the latest electronic advances, the most welcome innovation was a heating and ventilation system that ensured a uniformly even temperature. ‘We declare before us generously that the wildest expectations have been exceeded,’ rhapsodised the Het Vaderland newspaper, ‘and that Mr. Tuschinski has donated a theatre to our country, of which are unparalleled.’

Not everyone was quite so impressed. Tuschinski and his brothers-in-law would be fired by the Nazis, who renamed their pride and joy and dispatched the creators to concentration camps. By way of resistance, on Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday, a British as well as a Dutch and flag were flown from one of the cinema’s windows.

Happily, those ghosts live on. Post-Liberation, Max Gerschtanowitz, one of the families’ only three survivors, inherited The Tuschinski, reinstating the original name; in 1967, not before time, it was declared a national monument in due recognition of that endlessly alluring design.

Now sandwiched unobtrusively between a clothes store and a cheese shop, walking unwittingly past that imperious Gothic frontage is immeasurably easier than resisting climbing the steps to check out what’s showing in the palatial Screen 1, easily the biggest auditorium I’ve ever come across. Or hear an organ recital on a Saturday morning. Even Pieter den Besten’s murals, lost in a fire in 1941, have been rediscovered and restored.

In the same bracket, architecturally and aesthetically speaking, is Manhattan’s four-storey Radio City Music Hall. Opening in December 1932 as a venue for stage shows, it was rebranded within two weeks, primarily as the world’s largest cinema. Half a century later, that regal interior was celebrated with wistful and captivating nostalgia by Woody Allen in Radio Days.

When it comes to contemporary design, a Lifetime Achievement Award goes unabashedly to the recently redesigned and tarted up National Film Theatre. Known initially as the Telekinema and run by the British Film Institute, it originally opened as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, next to the railway arches separating the Royal Festival Hall from Waterloo Station, before moving six years later to the Southbank, where it nestles invitingly alongside the National Theatre, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery. 

Even for those of us who have spent our lifetimes walking from Waterloo or the Embankment to discover something new or rediscover something old, the NFT still has plenty to commend it besides hosting the glittering London Film Festival: increasingly inclusive and varied themed seasons and a splendidly revamped and overflowing book and DVD shop, but above all the Mediatheque, where you can investigate the world’s largest film and TV archive for absolutely literally nothing.

All the same, having called the Netherlands home for nearly half a decade, my architectural cravings have lately found stern competition in a pair of postmodern Dutch masters. While none of its five screens can be characterised as unusually spacious, The Forum in Groningen is a 10-floor arts complex also encompassing libraries, restaurants, a museum, rooftop screenings and easily the most humungous indoor TV screen I’ve ever seen. More visually ambitious and arresting is The Eye, such a glorious Sydney Opera House-ish eyecatcher to any traveller entering Amsterdam airspace.  

AMONG THE MANY incentives to leave bedroom, café or library to watch a movie, the opportunity to marvel at and wallow in the surrounding environment – especially now you can pay top dollar to share a sofa and order food and drink – is among the most compelling. Most vitally of all, nevertheless, is what’s on the bill.

Having recently seen The Wizard of Oz for the very first time there, and also caught large chunks of a splendidly comprehensive Coen Brothers retrospective – complete with items the brothers themselves sanctify such as Ivan Passer’s grotesquely neglected neo-noir thriller Cutter’s Way – I can vouch only too readily for The Eye’s sagacious programmers. The field, nonetheless, is highly competitive.

Let’s start with the crown jewel of Brighton, the grand old Duke of York’s, erected at a cost of £3000 by actress-manager Violet Melnotte-Wyatt on the site of the Amber Ale Brewery, whose walls still constitute the back of the auditorium. Artfully restored after being purchased by the Picturehouse group in 1994, fact junkies might like to learn that the 20-foot pair of can-can dancer’s legs now adorning the roof were acquired from the Not The Moulin Rouge Theatre in Oxford.      

In my experience of arthouses, nonetheless, you can’t get much more idiosyncratic than Burg Kino. Even now, fully 76 years since my favourite movie was released, this intimate arthouse/grind house in the heart of Vienna still boasts two showings per week of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which was shot in the devastated city shortly after the end of WW2. In fact, as I type, I’m wearing the t-shirt I bought there: Orson Welles-as-Harry Lime on the front, 3 on the back.

Then there’s the Prince Charles in Soho, where I took out a lifetime membership a decade ago (at 60 quid, a steal worthy of Bonnie and Clyde, and it’s ‘only’ 100 now). Sing-a-long fancy dress parties for The Sound of Music and The Rocky Horror Picture Show are regulars, likewise all-nighters devoted to specific genres, stars or directors. There’s just a handful of other cinemas I know of that I could walk into any day of the week, at just about any time, and find something worth getting lost in.

One stands, once again, in Amsterdam, another in New Amsterdam, a third on Paris’s handsomely stocked Left Bank. Uncoincidentally, the first of these, LAB111, is but a short hop from Flo’s, a fantabulous bagelry on the south side of Amsterdam where us Seinfeld tragics can find The Jerry, The Kramer, The Newman and even my own daringly non-kosher creation The Elaine (bacon and cream cheese on an exquisitely boiled cinnamon bagel, should you ever summon the intestinal fortitude).

That said, I wouldn’t have discovered Flo’s had I not already been a habitual visitor to the only cinema an expat can rely upon for English versions (or versions with English subtitles) of classics and obscurities as well as acclaimed new releases from Dubrovnik to Dubai. That the name of the bar commemorates Stanley Kubrick’s timelessly magnificent satire Dr Strangelove should tell you all you need to know about the taste of its programmers.

The New Amsterdam challenger is another Forum in another SoHo, the NYC one. Best-loved for its continuous celebration of black-and-white, pre-digital filmmaking, it has a Parisian counterpart, Filmothèque du Quartier Latin. The latter’s reliably enticing offerings lose their allure, from a Rosbif’s perspective, not only by scorning English subtitles, but primarily because the venue is the closest I have ever come to spending evenings in a genuine fleapit. If nothing else, those shabby seats and dusty floors and urine-stained toilets made it the ideal place to watch, as I did a few weeks ago, the Coen Brothers’ scuzzy debut Blood Simple.

In keeping with Parisian tradition, a neighbouring duo serving movie nerds and Sorbonne students alike, Christine and Écoles, are both barely more inviting, public health-wise, than Filmothèque. All is forgiven by a steady diet of largely American and French classics spiced up by a variety of clubs from Kino Pop (independent shorts) to the Afrocentric Air Afrique.

TIME TO RETURN to Dutchland. One reason I felt so comfortable after flying into Schiphol in June 2020 was a news story: cinemas were reopening. In Britain, they would stay shut for most of the year. A month later, Rotterdam sealed the deal.

Bombed about a bit during the war, as Carol Reed would doubtless have put it, Europe’s busiest port boasts a towering IMAX on Schouwburgplein (three of the world’s five hulkiest IMAXes, I was soon surprised to discover, are Dutch). Better yet, I speedily discovered three spiffing arthouses within walking distance of NH Atlanta, the art deco hotel off Coolsingel I called home until last summer.

But for the daily alternatives proffered by Lanteren Venster, Cinerama and neighbour-brother Kino, I would probably have retreated back to Amsterdam. Then I found out about the glories of the Cineville card: £20 per month for all the movies you can consume and every single Dutch arthouse at your beck and call. Yes, heaven by any other name.

A city of Rotterdam’s size boasting a trio of such unquestionably fine venues is rare indeed. Each of these anti-fleapits, moreover, has its own distinctive appeal. Home to the Arab Film Festival, Lantaren Venster, for instance, lies just over the Erasmusburg dividing north from south Rotterdam, and is also a major jazz venue. It has just undergone an elegant renovation and claims the further advantage of a waterside café.

Another recipient of a recent refresh is the expanded Kino, now home to six screens. The newish menu is bulging with appetising burgers, the walls chockfull of Chad Gerritsen’s delicious photographs from the set of Apocalypse Now. Seeing Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz there on Thanksgiving has become an annual ritual.

Nevertheless, this four-movie-a-week (minimum) junkie’s preferences and loyalties lie with Cinerama, which opened its doors in 1960 and was faithfully rebuilt in 1980. In fusing the best of the elements already mentioned, it adds two special ingredients: the art deco décor and the perfect name. And a Pyjamarama of a Bananarama of a Barbarella of a panorama is truly what it offers.

It was, I admit, love at first sight and second, a now long-running affair that soon prompted me to request permission to photograph every nook and cranny. No lush carpets or flamboyant wallcoverings like The Tuschinski or Radio City, sure, but interiors to faint for. Even the posters lining the staircase and first floor are distinctive: plenty of originals (Death in Venice, Black Orpheus and no fewer than three different Barbarellas) but also cheeky reimaginings by local artists ranging from Sin City and Baby Driver to Jobs and Get Out. Such distinctiveness is further aided by a board game club (bring your own), but be warned: Monopoly is now banned owing to a historical propensity for histrionics.  

The seven screening rooms, to be frank, put 90% of their British counterparts to shame – as most Dutch arthouses do – for size of screen, leg-friendliness and bumfort (sorry, couldn’t resist). Plopping my own bum in the middle of the front row of the vast Screen 1 in the middle of the day is now my most shameless hobby, not to mention the closest I will ever get to feeling like David O. Selznick lounging in his own palatial screening room.

Annual attractions include the Wildlife Festival and the refreshingly unsnobbish weekly schedule is never less than varied. Over the past month I’ve seen a raft of movies ranging all the way from newies such as Flow, A Real Pain and Mr K to Andrey Tarkovsky’s Mirror, one of the monthly ‘Classics’. The latest wheeze is Groundhog Day Cinema: on the second of each month for the rest of 2025 you can wallow in the eponymous Bill Murray gem.

I can only conclude with a soulfelt plea. Right now, scandalously, Cinerama and the Prince Charles are both threatened with closure, for the simple and profoundly dispiriting reason that apartment blocks are miles more profitable. And if pre-eminent picture palaces of that ilk are allowed to fade away, whither the less renowned? Let’s just say joining the tens of indignant thousands who have already signed their petitions seems more socially responsible than snorting ‘Hasta la vista baby’.