The architecture of moviegoing: Can the multiplex stay in the picture?

I read a lot of magazines, blogs and social-media feeds dedicated to architecture — more than I’d like to admit. “Carne y Arena,” a collaboration between Iñárritu and his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, was described by my colleague Steven Zeitchik as “a multi-platform experience that includes a VR film; it is so sprawling the festival installed it in an airplane hangar 20 minutes outside downtown Cannes.” Viewers strapped on Oculus Rift headsets and then set out on foot to experience a 360-degree story set in the Arizona desert, along the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s telling that there wasn’t a suitable space among the traditional Cannes theaters to accommodate “Carne y Arena,” but advances in VR are hardly the only threat to the traditional architecture of moviegoing. — Christopher Hawthorne Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, the head of this year’s Cannes competition jury, touched on that shift and the worries that come with it when he argued during the festival that a movie screen “should not be smaller than the chair on which you are sitting.” It was a curious place to draw that particular cultural line. » christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com Twitter: @hawthornelat ALSO: Netflix’s first movie appears at Cannes, and so does the controversy Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality project takes film to new frontiers—and questions Practically a film festival every night: The new ecology of the old-movie scene in L.A.