Mindy and I saw the new Batman movie opening weekend at Seattle’s venerable Cinerama theater, and loved it. But since then everyone’s telling me I was a chump for not seeing it in Imax. Which we had intentionally not done.

Here’s the thing about Imax: it’s too big. As anyone knows who has ever designed a home theater system or gone to a movie with Mindy’s dad, the “best” place to sit at a movie is about one and a half screen widths back from the screen. That’s the distance, I guess, where you’re not so far that you start losing detail, but not so close that visual information starts getting lost around the periphery of your eyesight.

So size matters. Imax has great sound and, thanks to its large film size, a strikingly clearer picture than 35mm. But it’s also designed to be a more immersive viewing experience, with picture stretching far above and below you. I think that’s great, for a 20-minute doc about the Grand Canyon or coral reefs or whatever-the-hell glorified PBS material that Maxxies (actual term just invented by me!) tend to go to.

But when I go to a typical dramatic movie, I don’t really want to see image stretching above and below me, like I’m on an amusement park ride. I don’t need facial closeups to be the size of small office buildings. Bigger isn’t always better.

When we lived in Utah, one of the local multiplexes had a near-Imax-sized “Super Screen” on which they’d show typical Imax fare, but also some theatrical releases. You could buy a ticket, as I did, to Unbreakable or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and then be surprised to find that you wouldn’t be watching it on a typical movie screen, but were instead sitting way too close to something way too big. The subtitles in Crouching Tiger were a particular problem. The whole movie, my head was swiveling back and forth like a typewriter ribbon, or a spectator at Wimbledon.

But yesterday, with all the raves I was hearing, I decided to skip “work” and re-see Dark Knight in Imax–and I actually thought its use of Imax was pretty canny. Almost every “character” scene was 35mm, projected in a narrower aspect ratio (1.86:1, I think) that whittled the Imax screen down into something almost like a real movie theater, only with awesome sound and fewer texting teenagers. But every cut to some bigger, more, panoramic view–a skyline, a dizzying stunt, whatever–was shot in Imax, with the full height and clarity you expect from a boring but eye-popping short subject about hot-air ballooning or astronauts or something. And the transitions weren’t jarring at all, which really surprised me. Cross-cutting between Imax helicopter shots of a car chase to 35mm character moments in the back seat of a police van worked just fine.

So am I coming around on Imax for dramatic film? Maybe if it’s used as judiciously as Chris Nolan did. And I should probably get used to it; this may be the future. The theater people told me that every single Imax screening of Dark Knight–four or five a day–has sold out, typically days in advance. Every screening, even the morning and early-afternoon ones, for weeks. There’s no way directors of future prestige-tentpole movies will be able to resist.

Just so long as they’re not in (ugh) 3-D…