Surprising things happen to people's faces when a film really entrances them. They stop focusing on all the personality presentation we take for granted when we talk to each other: the polite eye contact, the alert expression that says "I'm listening and reacting to what you're saying." When people watch movies, their faces go a little slack, and their emotions come through clear and raw. I had a particularly great experience observing this back in 2007, when I had friends over to watch J.A. Bayona's excellent horror film The Orphanage. Having already seen the film, I decided that instead of watching it, I'd watch my friends watching it. Watching other people gasp or shrivel in nervous anticipation let me see the movie freshly through their eyes.

That sense of voyeurism, that ability to see people in a vulnerable state and re-appreciate a piece of art at the same time, is at least some of the appeal behind #AllMyMovies, the social-media-ready art installation that 29-year-old actor Shia LaBeouf staged last week. For the piece, LaBeouf watched all his feature films back-to-back at New York's Angelika Film Center over three days, while a fixed camera transmitted his reactions to the internet via live stream. #AllMyMovies is the latest in a series of LaBeouf-centered performance art pieces, and the second to widely solicit public interaction: in this case, admission to the film series was free, and anyone over 18 who was willing to submit to a weapons check could join LaBeouf in the theater, space permitting. The line to enter the screening room built steadily over the course of the event, with the wait time eventually stretching to several hours as word-of-mouth grew.

A stream of journalists infiltrated the Angelika to write about what it's like to sit in a darkened theater with a movie star, waiting for him to do something interesting: Alison Willmore for BuzzFeed, Abraham Riesman for Vulture, Jordan Hoffman for The Guardian, Erin Whitney for ScreenCrush, Ariana Bacle for Entertainment Weekly. And they all apparently came away nonplussed by the experience, many voicing disappointment that they weren't able to get much out of theater management, or anything out of LaBeouf himself. By all accounts, he barely spoke throughout the three-day screening series, and only acknowledged people's comments or questions with minimal nods or shrugs.

But over the course of three days, the initial bafflement was largely replaced with enthusiasm. "Shia LaBeouf Is Getting the Best Reviews of His Career for Watching His Own Movies," Sam Adams wrote at CriticWire. Rolling Stone's David Ehrlich called it "the best performance of Shia LaBeouf's career," and "a work of genius." Those watching the stream and using the #AllMyMovies hashtag on Twitter cracked jokes and posted screencaps and GIFs capturing what the actor was up to at any given moment — laughing, crying, chomping on popcorn, sleeping, cringing at scenes in Michael Bay's Transformers movies. But by and large, the tone was companionable, and the jokes were not necessarily at LaBeouf's expense.

One important factor working in #AllMyMovies' favor is that it has nothing to do with the plagiarism accusations that surrounded many of his public projects in 2014. When news got out that the script for his short film "HowardCantour.com" was copied nearly verbatim from a comic by Daniel Clowes, LaBeouf repeatedly apologized on Twitter — using plagiarized apologies — and via an interview using uncredited lines from writers and artists. He may have meant all this as a puckish joke, but it read as flip and insincere. #IAMSORRY itself took heavy cues from Marina Abramović's 2010 installation "The Artist Is Present." And LaBeouf's one apparently original stab at mending fences — hiring a skywriter to print "I AM SORRY DANIEL CLOWES" in vapor over Los Angeles — fell flat when numerous press outlets pointed out that Clowes lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

The fact that throughout this series of colorful, exaggerated public gestures, LaBeouf didn't actually contact the man he'd stolen seemed to confirm the overall narrative of LaBeouf as a petulant, attention-seeking former child star. (Especially when he announced he was "retiring from all public life," then didn't.) Given that he wasn't speaking in his own words, it was impossible to tell what was really going on in his head, so there was plenty of room to assume the worst about his intentions. His grotesque, flamboyant martyrdom with #IAMSORRY didn't help: he might have been channeling real personal turmoil, but it was impossible to tell, given this burlesque dumbshow of suffering. And the fact that so many of these gestures happened within weeks of each other made the self-pity behind them increasingly exhausting.

It's been over a year since LaBeouf's last public happening, and 18 months since #IAMSORRY. In that time he's had some legal trouble, most notably being arrested in June 2014, and again in October. But he's still been much less ubiquitous in the news over the last 18 months than he was in early 2014. And that lower profile gave him the opportunity to define this latest project on his own terms, instead of as part of a continuum of troubled behavior.

With #AllMyMovies, Shia was celebrating something (in this case, cinema) instead of wallowing in self-abnegation. Sure, LaBeouf himself was often up on the screen, but in the narrow space created by the live stream, the image of him at the movies was decontextualized. The piece was unquestionably performative, but the artifice wasn't nearly as heavy — there were no outsized antics, just a man in a chair in a theater. No matter how abnormal the installation itself was, the normalcy of his presence, largely unchanging from hour to hour, was lulling. Plenty of commentators assumed LaBeouf's reactions to the films were feigned — he is, after all, a professional actor — but even if they were, he was acting in a much more intimate scale.

[Update: While this piece was being edited, NewHive posted a lengthy interview with LaBoeuf, his partners Rönkkö and Turner, and NewHive co-founder and CEO Zach Verdin. LaBoeuf does in fact go into great detail about what was going through his head during the installation.]