A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that was taken by some as an obituary for the movies; the response went a little bit viral and a little bit sour. (I’ve never been sub-tweeted so much in my life.) The movies aren’t dying, obviously, but I do believe their most mainstream iteration — the stuff that comes out of the major studios and plays in the multi-luxiplexes — is beginning to wither on the vine and that the most creative aspects of cinema are playing on smaller screens, in smaller theaters, and to smaller audiences. And I believe that, in time, allthose things will continue to get smaller.

But what about movies that are big — I mean, really big — in size or setting or concept? They’re still out there. They’re just not playing where most people can see them. Yes, the major theatrical chains still feature market-tested blockbusters that are huge in terms of noise and sensation, but more often than not they’re puny in inspiration. Where do you go to see ’em the way they used to make ’em: Ginormous and good?

Well, from Sept. 16-25 you should probably go to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square, where the 70mm and Widescreen Festival! (exclamation point theirs, but I share the opinion) is unspooling in all its opulence. You’ve never seen “Lawrence of Arabia’’ (Sept. 16) or Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty’’ (Sept. 18) or “The Wild Bunch’’ (Sept. 19) or “West Side Story’’ (Sept. 22) or “2001: A Space Odyssey’’ (Sept. 23) the way they were meant to be seen? By all that is holy, go to the Somerville and splurge.

The theater is also showing a few more recent films, such as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar’’ (Sept. 20). Can you tell the difference between 70mm and digital projection? Of course you can: Celluloid gives off a glow, a depth, and richness of colors that digital, for all its sharpness, can’t approach, and 70mm is whipped cream with the cherry on top. And the movies — well, yes, the movies.

The 70mm festival represents the past. This week I got a look at one of the cinema’s possible futures, and, man, does it have a ways to go. “Career Opportunities in Organized Crime’’ claims to be the first feature-length 360-degree virtual reality movie ever made, and when the publicist sent me an e-mail about it, I said, sure, send me the funny headset.

That headset, the VR Box, arrived a few days later, accompanied by instructions so poorly translated into English that they function more properly as Zen koans. (“Fixed phone card board is taken out from the side of.’’) It took a while, but soon I was standing in my living room with the helmet strapped on my head, iPhone in the viewing slot, and headphones clamped over my ears, turning in circles as I followed the action of this extremely low-budget mob comedy. I looked, I am sure, like an idiot. In the future, we will all look like idiots.

(You can also watch the movie, which is available for $1.99 at www .reelhouse.org/akibimi/mafiacareers, on your phone or laptop without the headset and immersive 3-D effects.)

A mockumentary in which a Russian crime boss hires a camera crew to document his attempts to recruit new blood, “Career Opportunities in Organized Crime’’ is a pretty terrible movie made by pretty smart people with pretty minimal filmmaking experience. Writer-director-producer Alex Oshmyansky, 31, is an emergency room radiologist with a few shorts under his belt and a big enthusiasm for VR technology. He shot the 81-minute film in his free time, in doctors’ offices, and he admits he learned as he went along. “As I look back on it,’’ he says, “a lot of the early scenes that are interviews and talking head shots — VR doesn’t add a ton to that.’’

But Oshmyansky, who’s now working on a VR documentary to be shot in Iraq, also notes that acting in a 360-degree proscenium is closer to theater than film, and that the long takes/wide angles aesthetic of current VR presents a circular screen-tableau for which there’s as yet no existing shot language. Unfortunately, there may not be as long as the technology’s visuals remain this blurry, static, and low-rez.

Still, virtual reality promises a film experience as big as the distant horizon — someday. I’m not holding my breath. Anyway, a movie that’s immense in a radically different fashion is right here and right now.

That’s correct: “The Clock’’ has returned to the Museum of Fine Arts.

Christian Marclay’s installation piece first arrived at the MFA in 2011 sounding like an innovative gimmick: a 24-hour clip-show made from scenes across the history of movies, each fragment embedded with a watch or a clock or a character saying the time, each moment synchronized with the actual time out there in the real world. It’s both avant-garde art and a functioning timepiece: Drop in for five minutes or five hours and never be late for your dentist appointment!

But there’s a reason “The Clock’’ has drawn record crowds wherever it appears. It’s a work mesmerizing and rife with meaning on multiple levels, obsessed with time and the ways we perceive its unfolding. Sit there long enough and the same actors appear at different moments in their lives and careers. Films you know surface like whales; movies you wish you knew appear and vanish.

The piece has been ingeniously constructed to flow with rhythms of suspense, tragedy, farce. The inexorable build-up toward noon climaxes with an eruption of church bells from “High Noon’’ (1952) while the post-midnight stretch is a meditation on the ways the movies process sleep. (The MFA will host four “overnight parties’’ during the film’s run from Sept. 17 through Jan. 29, 2017; check the website and bring your footie pajamas.)

Is “The Clock’’ a “movie’’? I know some people who think a non-narrative loop shown in a museum could and should never qualify. By contrast, I think it’s one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen, even if I’ll almost certainly never see it in its entirety. In terms of duration, conception, film history, the editing that never stops teasing us with storytelling, and the ceaseless rush of images that insist on both time’s passing and our own, Marclay has created the endless dream we always wished the movies could be — a virtual reality that doesn’t need a headset. “The Clock’’ is the cinema’s expanded consciousness, and it doesn’t get bigger than that.

Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.