Plays are an important part of British culture. The West End theatre district in London is the best place to watch a professional play, but acting also takes place in every school and village hall across the country.

There are over 2,500 non-professional drama groups in the UK today and they are an active part of community life. People from all walks of life take on acting roles in addition to their regular jobs. They do it for fun, for the love of acting and as a way to meet new people.

Not everyone in a drama club is a skilled actor, but enthusiasm is considered to be more important than talent. Friends, family members and neighbors enjoy getting together to watch the final performance and telling the people they know to “break a leg”. It’s a great way of bringing communities together. Also, in many rural parts of Britain, non-professional theatre is the only chance people have to see plays for miles around.

Many people get a taste for acting at school. Every school puts on a play at least once per year, usually at Christmas, and parents love coming to watch their children perform. Ask any British person and they’re sure to have happy memories of being in their school’s Christmas play, whether they played the role of Mary or Joseph or perhaps even a sheep or a donkey.

Another Christmas theatre tradition is the pantomime(童话剧). Pantomimes are a type of musical comedy for families. The audience is encouraged to participate in the performance—singing along with the music and shouting to the actors. Pantomimes are really fun to watch, especially for children.

British people love going to the theatre, professional or not, and many of them also enjoy performing. If you have the chance, go and see a play in the UK.

Nowadays, we needn’t look far to find something new to watch. So why do so many of us choose to watch films we’ve already seen, even knowing every line of the script?

A survey revealed rewatching films we’ve already seen countless times is common. Some titles were mentioned repeatedly — Back To The Future, Top Gun, and musicals like The Rain. In 2016, a website surveyed 1,169 people to list the 25 most rewatched films — with Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz and The sound of Music taking the top spots.

Finding which movies we watch again and again is easy. Exactly why we do it is less clear. Obviously we love them and think they deserve our attention. One said, “Some films are what I think ‘complete’ and are so familiar that you can stop and start at any point. They are deeply satisfying and you can lose yourself in them.”

While that might explain the second, third, or fourth viewing, what keeps us coming back to a movie when we already know every detail, and there are so many other new films to choose from?

One explanation is that watching something familiar takes up less mental energy. We don’t have to concentrate to work out what’s going on. Instead, we just sit back and relax. When faced with diverse choices, it’s easier to return to an old film that we believe won’t disappoint us.

A psychological phenomenon, “the mere exposure effect” — in which we develop a preference for something familiar — could also be a good explanation. So the more we watch, the more we want to watch.

A 2012 study on cultural “re-consumption” found that rewatching movies can also make us reflect on how we’ve grown a measuring stick for how much our lives have changed. Perhaps that’s one of the biggest reasons why we return to films, to recall not only for a time in history but for a time in our lives.

Have you ever wanted to become an engineer? The new IMAX film Dream Big teaches viewers how engineers use their professional skills to help the world. The film hits IMAX theaters nationwide on February 17th to celebrate Engineers Week.

The film takes place in locations like China, Dubai and Africa. It tells the stories of engineers who try to come up with new ideas to save energy and help people. It was directed by Greg MacGillivray, who was the first documentary filmmaker to reach $1 billion in worldwide sales. But how did MacGillivray get into the moviemaking business in the first place?

“I grew up at the beach. My first movies were about surfing and the ocean. As time went on, I saw the changes in the ocean, in relationship to pollution and overfishing. So I started making films about protection of nature,” MacGillivray said. Now, his films cover many topics including human innovation.

One of the engineers in Dream Big is Angelica Hemandez. In high school, she was on a team that beat MIT, a university, in an underwater robotics competition. Now, Hemandez is working to make energy use efficient. When asked what she felt when her high school won the competition, she said, “It was disbelief, then excitement, and feeling really hopeful that you can achieve more than you think.” Today, the engineering work she does is helping people use less energy to save money and resources.

The task of Dream Big is to show people the good that engineers can do in the world. “That was why I wanted to make this movie,” MacGillivray explains. “We want to explain engineering in a way that will get the kids excited about it.”