There was those days of Sunday prayer when you could feel the love and belonging inside the church as the choir song uplifted everyone from their chairs and had them singing and cheering along. While those days may still exist in churches, our best temples of human emotional bonding have become movie theatres.

In the last few years, there have been an array of films that have drawn large audiences into the auditoriums and halfway through the film, each person would realize that they were part of something bigger and more powerful.

At the release of Mel Gibson"s biblical film The Passion of the Christ, there were several reported seizures within the audience and many more emotional breakdowns because of the powerful nature and message of the film.

Or how about the thousands of hardcore fans who camped outside the theatres for weeks at a time to be the first to see the latest installation in the Star Wars prequels, Revenge of the Sith.

Was this the beginning of a new age of cinema where the attendance was less about ht film and more about the belonging factor? Belonging to a religious group or a convention of Star Trek /Star Wars movie buffs.

Films like the Harry Potter series and more recently Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire skyrocketed box-office ticket sales to amazing new heights. The word of mouth on films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory spreads through schools and it draws every child as if it was a mandatory school project.

Then there are those fans of art house films that go see films because of a shared interest in auteur films. The more recent examples include films like Memento, Mulholland Drive, Crash and Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com) that offer its audiences a new way of seeing films. The audiences may be completely confused by these films but they come and stay because of the atmosphere and the knowledge that the room is full of others who watch movies for the sake of being surprised at the risk of getting confused once in a while.

While watching Machiavelli Hangman an audience member offered this explanation, "Some jokes I didn"t get but I still laughed out loud because everyone else was laughing. This becomes a micro-community experience and it really enhances the enjoyment factor."