Can the grand, ceremonial experience of the opera translate to the garden-variety movie theater? At The New Yorker, author Roxana Robinson evaluates the cinema experience from the perspective of a seasoned opera-goer, finding that while the HD video broadcasts fall short of the kind of "emotional potency" and "social pyrotechnics" that exemplify New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, the close-up shots they afford give a refreshing kind of intimacy. Some of Robinson's harshest criticism is directed at the "banal, intrusive chatter" of advertisements playing before the performance starts: "instead of sinking into the delicious dream-state of opera, you distance yourself."