The most common complaint about rewatching a film is that it doesn't produce the same experience as the first viewing. The sense of discovery is gone. The plot is known. The ending can't surprise.
This complaint is based on the assumption that the first-viewing experience is the standard against which subsequent viewings should be measured. It isn't. Subsequent viewings are a different kind of watching - access to different things about the film - and the reward for developing the rewatch habit is access to the level of the film that the first viewing couldn't see.
WHAT THE FIRST VIEWING IS FOR
The first viewing is for the story. This is what first viewings are built to provide - the experience of narrative discovery, the progression from not-knowing to knowing, the specific pleasure of following a story. The filmmaker, aware that you don't know what happens, structures the film around your not-knowing. The information is withheld, released, misdirected, and eventually resolved in the specific sequence the filmmaker has constructed for a viewer who is experiencing it for the first time.
This first-viewing experience is designed and it is pleasurable and it is not the film. It is the film's delivery mechanism for a specific audience relationship. The film itself - the formal choices, the argument, the specific way the craft is in service of the argument - is partially obscured by the experience of following the story.
WHAT SUBSEQUENT VIEWINGS ARE FOR
A second viewing of any formally serious film produces access to the formal decisions that the first viewing's narrative attention prevented you from seeing. You already know what happens, which means you can watch what the film is doing rather than following where it's going. The cut you didn't notice because you were following the story becomes visible. The production design detail that you registered as environment becomes legible as argument. The performance that read as character becomes visible as craft.
The specific practice: on the second viewing, choose one element of the film to track deliberately. The editing rhythm. The lighting decisions. The camera position. The sound design. Watch the whole film with that single element in your primary attention. What you see with that focus will be more than you could have found without it.
THE SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES
The first-ten-minutes rewatch: watch the first ten minutes of any film you've seen before. The formal argument of the whole film is usually present in compressed form in the opening - the visual grammar, the emotional register, the relationship between camera and character that the rest of the film develops. Rewatching the opening with the knowledge of what the film is doing is a different experience from watching it as orientation.
The pause-and-look practice: pause the film at random moments during the rewatch and look at the composition as a photograph. What is in the frame that you hadn't consciously registered? Where are the subjects positioned? What is in focus? What is the quality of the light? The pause reveals the composition in ways that the moving image's momentum prevents.
The scene selection rewatch: choose the three scenes you remember most clearly from the first viewing and watch them in isolation before watching the full film. The scene you remember is the scene that did something to you - identifying what it did, formally, prepares you to watch the full film for the craft that produced that effect.
HOW MANY TIMES IS THE RIGHT NUMBER
There is no right number. The films that reward the most viewings are the films that are most formally dense - the ones that have made enough decisions deliberately enough that there is always something new to find. Seven Samurai. Jeanne Dielman. In the Mood for Love. 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are films that professional critics and scholars have watched dozens of times and continue to find new things in.
The practical guideline: any film you find yourself thinking about three days after watching it is a candidate for a second viewing. The thinking is evidence that the film is doing something you haven't fully understood yet. The second viewing is the investigation.
This first-viewing experience is designed and it is pleasurable and it is not the film.