The Third Man is playing in 35mm at Film Forum in New York, held over through July 16.
Seeing it in 35mm is different. The Dutch angles, the cobblestone streets of postwar Vienna, the sewer chase at the end. Anton Karas's zither score comes out of nowhere and never leaves. Carol Reed shot this in 1949 and it still looks like something no one has figured out how to replicate.
If you have seen The Third Man on a laptop you have not really seen it. Orson Welles is on screen for maybe fifteen minutes and he is the whole movie.
Before this: Welles's Citizen Kane for what a single director can do to a frame. Or Reed's The Fallen Idol, made the same year, the same idea of innocence undone.
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