A giant puppet weaves its way through the narrow streets of Milan’s QT8 quarter, trailed by a gaggle of children and an impromptu brass band. It is early July, and the M’incanto festival—financed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture—is in full swing. Over the course of the afternoon, 17 free events will spill across five public spaces: itinerant theatre, a world-music concert that melds ancestral rhythms with contemporary melodies, and a workshop where abandoned objects are coaxed back to life. The ethos is civic and tactile: reinterpret urban space, stitch back a frayed community fabric.

Thousand of miles away, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the municipal government has programmed more than a hundred free holiday attractions: circus clinics, film screenings in a lovingly restored cinema, storytelling sessions in public libraries. At the Teatro Nacional in Brasília, the exhibition Constelações Contemporâneas gathers over 200 works by 41 local artists—a deliberate, state-backed push to democratise contemporary art. From these Latin American nodes, and from the Quartiere 8 of Milan, the logic is the same: culture as public good, funded by the state, free at the point of use, and stubbornly rooted in the physicality of bodies gathering.

The global box office tells a parallel story, one arranged on a vastly different scale. Illumination’s Minions and Monsters has just earned a 88 per cent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes—the studio’s highest to date—and is projected to vault past one billion dollars in global takings. Disney’s live-action Moana, a shot-for-shot remake of the 2016 animated hit, unspools this week on a $200–250 million budget, leaning on spectacular effects and the star power of Dwayne Johnson. Analysts in France parse the phenomenon with weary precision: “The biggest hits are those that recreate the original almost shot for shot,” notes pop-culture specialist Stephane Durand. “For people interested in storytelling, it’s pretty poor. But as long as the films make a billion dollars, it will go on.”

Yet even within this high-budget ecology, counter-movements stir. The 40th anniversary of Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy that bombed in theatres but later became a cult fixture via VHS, is being celebrated with packed retrospectives and a surge of viral social-media clips. Its hand-built puppets and optical illusions stand as a bracing alternative to digital sheen. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, meanwhile, is being read by reviewers as a deliberate return to the director’s own earlier register—a thriller that cites Encounters of the Third Kind and Minority Report, insisting on human empathy even amid a conspiracy narrative. Critics at RogerEbert.com have hailed the Illumination megahit as a “true triumph” in its construction as a children’s comedy that also honours cinema’s pioneers, a nod to the possibility that even the most industrial product can carry a residue of film history.

Back in Milan, the street parade has dispersed, but the Orchestra Carimbò is still playing in a courtyard. For a few hours, a municipal square became a listening room, open to anyone who paused. It is a fragile, contingent magic, the sort that cannot be scaled to a billion-dollar release—and perhaps that is exactly the point.