I have seen many many movies in my life, and it seems that nowadays, all theater films are well lit and are VERY smooth and show almost no grain or any kind of distortion, why then do people want to add grain to their features?

they think it gives them a gritty crime look, or a gritty real life look, or a gritty.... and it goes on and on

i personally think it makes them look like they were shot on a ZR-40 in low light, but that may be just me

Grain doesn't work well for most movies, but people don't seem to be able to realize that. One movie that had lots of grain but it work really well in was Band of Brothers.

i think grain makes things look more 1950s sci-fi atom age style. i add grain that's so miniscule that you'd never even notice it, but if you look at the movie with out it, and the movie with it, side by side, you can tell a difference. i dont add it like a mad man so that the footage looks 20 years old, i just add it to touch it up a bit.

Grain also shows up quite a bit it Super8 and 16mm if it isn't exposed properly.

Sometimes it is a budget artifact. Sometimes it is meant to be there for a certain look, like the Lenny Kravitz 70s rock style video to achieve the look of classic "rock docs".

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

The opposite question can be asked: Why make movies with no grain? It's not like most of our eyes are that sharp anyway.

Think about painting. For a few decades, painters tried to achieve a realistic, natural look. Something that no one could tell whether was a painting or a photograph.

And then people started to change, they decided that rendering naturalistic scenes was too limiting for painting, and so they started experiimenting with color, line, form. Things like Cubism, splatter paintings, impressionism, emerged. Now, people paint both: realistic and more abstract.

It's the same with film. Grain adds a gritty look, and a very unpolished look. It also adds a more immediate, intimate look. Most of us are used to 1-chip cameras to take home video, not a Super35mm camera with superfast lenses. So if they want to immediately capture that "caught in the moment" look, some film makers will use a 1-ship camera to film their movie.

Is it better or worse to film on a 1-chip instead of 35mm? It depends. CELEBRATION was shot on a 1-chip camera, and won awards, was invited to Cannes, and introduced the idea of Dogme95 to the world, and made Vinterberg a world class director.

Lots of Hollywoods movies are shot on 35mm, really sharp and clean, and people won't even rent them at Blockbuster.

I don't think band of brothers had any grain...

The whole thing didn't have grain, but a lot of spots did. It more just depended on what episode. But the episode "Carentan" had quite a lot of grain. As did other episodes