A. O. SCOTT It’s been 20 years since Susan Sontag wrote that “no amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals — erotic, ruminative — of the darkened theater.” Even then, before the arrival of the Netflix queue, moviegoing had, at least in the eyes of some cinephiles, lost its essential, sacred luster. For others, though, digital home viewing had the potential to usher in a new golden age. A decade after Sontag’s elegy, Roger Ebert hailed the DVD’s “incalculable value to those who love films.” It delivered “prints of such quality that the film can breathe before our eyes instead of merely surviving there.”

How quaint it all sounds. Ebert’s words testify to the lingering power of the old — digitally stored and projected motion pictures are technically neither “prints” nor “films” — and also to the speed with which the new passes into obsolescence. For the studios, DVDs were a boon to the bottom line, and to consumers they were collectible tokens of movie love. In any case, they didn’t last long and are now increasingly niche items rather than commodities for mass consumption. Why clutter your shelves with special editions of last year’s blockbusters when a whole mobile cinematheque is a few clicks and swipes away?

The deeper question, though, is whether the widespread, at-your-fingertips availability of movies is a blessing or a catastrophe or a little of both. Without wanting to play the devil’s advocate — or Sean Parker’s — I’m not entirely sure that streaming is necessarily an existential threat to moviegoing. Recent market research from the Motion Picture Association of America suggests that frequent moviegoers (defined as people who see a movie in a theater at least once a month) are more likely than their more casual counterparts to own gadgets like tablets or smartphones. And also, not to be completely heretical, what’s so sacred about “the darkened cinema” anyway?

It’s often idealized as a space of collective reverence and aesthetic bliss, where photochemical alchemy unfolds in room full of worshipers. But how often does that really happen? Most of the time aren’t we just eating unhealthy snacks and watching a digital file in obnoxious company? Couldn’t we just do that at home?

DARGIS It’s nice that we can pay five bucks to stream a crummy studio movie that looked too awful to leave the house for, I suppose, but I had superior, more interesting choices at my local video stores than I do with Netflix streaming (no Douglas Sirk!) or even Amazon. If you want to stream nonindustrial product, you often need to do time-consuming digging online. And even if you do, you will never find the online equivalent of a Kim’s Video — the extraordinary New York home-video emporium that closed in 2014 — because part of what made it great was being in that store with other people.