The good news about Sundance 608 is that you get your money's worth. The bad news is ... it's a lot of money.

Sundance 608 is a terrific place to see a movie; it can go 10 rounds with any other theater in town in terms of picture quality, sound quality and auditorium design. I went at 9:30 opening day and checked out Black Book, which looked like the most aggressively cinematic of the opening weeking line-up. The picture was bright, in-focus and stable, and the sound was crisp, dynamic and non-deafening. Any theater can get their act together to pull off such a feat on its opening weekend, true, but prior to the screening, a representative of the theater made a big production about how he would be around for the first few minutes of the screening, and how representatives from the theater would check in from time to time, with everyone anxious to hear any complaint. While this sounds like, and is, overkill, I've attended enough out-of-focus, improperly matted movies to appreciate the promise of mindfulness, and honestly do expect Sundance to set a new standard for quality and consistency of presentation. The chairs are luxurious, the popcorn is head and shoulders above any other theater in town, and the audience may just be a little less rowdy and more attentive, to boot. Of course, you would be too if your tickets were 34 percent more than the market rate.

Tickets at Sundance cost $8.75, the same as Star and a quarter more than Marcus Theatres, and Sundance has $6.25 matinee/child/senior pricing. But there's also a mandatory convenience fee -- and it's totally ingenious. The later in the day, the greater the fee. So while there are three matinees on the weekend, the convenience fee increases from $1 to $1.50 to $2 over the course of the afternoon, and gets bumped to $3 for the evening shows. "That's evil, not ingenious," I hear you say. But! On weekdays, everything gets bumped down a grade -- $2 for the evening, diminishing all the way up to no fee for a noon matinee. So, without changing the "ticket price," the theatre provides incentives for attending less crowded screenings. "Nope, still evil." Well, OK, that may be, but if it turns out that the fees are indeed cutting into business, they can always lower them across the board without "changing ticket prices." Plus, I'm sure their deals with the distributors are entirely about splitting the ticket revenues along some pre-determined ratio; convenience fees must be pure profit for the theater.

So what do you get for your convenience fee? Most obviously, you get to select your own seat, either online or at the theater. (Although there were only 20 of us attending Black Book, so even if we had walked in five minutes after it started, we still could have gotten the best seats in the house.) You also get an entirely unobnoxious pre-show -- no slides, no advertisements, just 10 minutes of Sundance Channel programming before the movie is supposed to start. (My viewing companion and I thought this was great, and we were getting into the dour animated short, "Uncle," until management cut it off a few minutes from the end to give their introductory spiel about being around to answer any questions.) And you get a premium exhibition experience.

Now, "premium exhibition experience" here means, in my opinion, "the bare minimum that we as paying moviegoers should demand from our multiplexes in terms of presentation," but I think most moviegoers are so inured to dim projector bulbs, slightly blurred pictures and muddy sound that we've lowered the bar for theaters. Now they can charge us more simply to deliver on their end of the experience. (I will often choose to see a blockbuster in IMAX, which is about the same cost differential as Sundance's maximum convenience free, and not because I necessarily crave a four-story screen -- rather, I know in IMAX that I'm going to get a rock-solid, appropriately lit picture and rich if overly loud sound.)

I suspect it's the lack of advertisements that you're literally paying for with the convenience fee -- no soft drink conglomerate or local jewelry store is further subsidizing your viewing. That said, I paid $11.75 for an evening show, which is more than I would have to pay in Manhattan, and I think a lot of people who are otherwise happy-go-lucky multiplex attendees are going to ask themselves whether they want to spend $23.50 for two tickets to see, for instance, a documentary shot on video (Air Guitar Nation) or a comedy from a TV director starring a TV actor (The TV Set -- not to take anything away from Jake Kasdan or David Duchovny, but at those prices, I think people will start to put value on selections that really deliver the outsized pleasures of the movies ... which Black Book totally does, by the way).

As for the space, it's nice enough, with that "bold look of Kohler" aesthetic. It's certainly not unattractive, but it's not as if it's so other that it transcends the fundamental nature of movie theaters. The two lounge areas on the first floor are sufficiently inviting; the second-floor restaurant and rooftop bar are pleasant, and the menu is about what you'd expect -- $6-$9 sandwiches, entrees from $12 and up, draft microbews for $4.50, etc. And if you want Sundance swag, it's definitely for sale. The concessions at Sundance 608 are bulletproof -- the popcorn, with actual butter, is really quite delicious, and the fountain drinks have that perfect chewable ice. And when you want to stray from the standards, then yes, there's Peet's coffee, and sushi, and Finnish mushroom soup.

Walking down the concrete canyon that is Hilldale's main drag after midnight, my companion noted, favorably, that the new Hilldale reminded him of Easton Town Center, a consciously overdesigned "lifestyle destination" in Columbus, Ohio -- he liked Hilldale for its hoity-toityness. I've also been to Easton, and the comparison holds, albeit in a scaled-down way. One strong memory of Easton is the 30-screen AMC theater that opened the summer I lived in Ohio; I saw so many terribly projected movies there. Five minutes of Eyes Wide Shut were so badly misframed that Nicole Kidman's head was on the bottom half of the screen and her torso was on the top; the ghost-in-the-kitchen sequence of The Sixth Sense was totally blurry (although I have to admit in that case, it added to the effect.) The one time that they actually offered their patrons a refund for a particularly rotten presentation, I cornered a manager about this and said this kind of thing was unacceptable -- we're paying customers, and maybe they just need to have a projectionist in each booth to make sure these things don't happen. Reader, he laughed at me. His basic worker was a high-turnover 16-year-old, which is not the talent pool from which one draws or cultivates projectionists. The idea didn't fit his business model at all. As it turns out, however, what I was proposing is the Sundance business model, and it's a good model -- as a moviegoer, you get a lot. For better or worse, you get what you pay for.