Screen Time: Lane Brown

Dim and Dimmer Going to the movies with projectionists aghast at the state of their field.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND JONATHAN MAJORS look like crap. Usually, they're two of the most radiant, dermatologically exceptional people in the world. But right now, they're decrepit husks of themselves, their faces so drained of color that they could pass for cadavers.

I'm watching Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaniain which she plays Janet van Dyne and he plays Kang the Conqueror at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square. Although a ticket to this matinee costs more than a month's worth of Netflix's priciest subscription plan, the image onscreen is so dim that it's hard to make out much of the movie's action. Next to me is Jack Theakston, a projection specialist at Dolby Laboratories, who immediately diagnoses the problem: This is a 2-D showing of Ant-Man, but some neglectful employee has forgotten to remove the 3-D filter from the projector.

"It's a polarized lens that cuts a picture's brightness by a third," he says. "They just have to push it to the side when they switch to 2-D, but theaters forget to do it all the time. You can tell when it's happening because if you look at the port-window glass, instead of a single image, you'll see two." He points up to the booth behind us, and sure enough there are two stacked beams.

Theakston has agreed to spend the afternoon assessing the projection quality at the AMC Empire and the nearby Regal E-Walk multiplex, the flagship locations of the two largest cinema chains in the U.S. I buy us tickets to various movies, and we sneak around from theater to theater.