Physics says that you're lying to yourself. The Relevant term is "depth of field". By heartedly recommend you google the term and do a little reading before you continue reading this reply.

In movies, the director and the cinematographer deliberately decide how much is and is not in focus.

This amount changes from scene to scene and is deliberately altered depending on what the director wants the audience to see and feel.

In the real world, as you move your eyes from point to point your eyes quickly refocus and your brain blocks out the transitions. In order to truly understand this phenomenon, you have to hold your thumb about 8 inches in front of your face stare at the tip of your upright thumb and do not move your eyes, but pay attention to what's behind your thumb .

And it can't be something 6 in away behind your thumb. Try it when you're 12 feet away from a bookcase and move your eyes back and forth between looking at the bookcase and looking at your thumb but always pay attention to the one you're not looking at.

And no it's not different for you, this is physics.

The blur that's motion blur comes from the fact that film only takes so many frames a second and the film can be fast or slow film, meaning fast film is more sensitive to light and so the aperture can be open for shorter amount of time and so there's less motion, blur, etc.. The blur that's focus blur is a combination of available light and what you're focusing on. The more light, the longer your depth of field because you're irises have shrunk down to be more pin prick like.

And then there's like the deal where you change the focal length of the lens while you move the camera closer or farther away from the person and it changes how much of the surroundings you can see. This film technique is used when they want to Make the audience feel a moment of disorientation or surprise. It has a very specific name like a push pull or something like that, but it's been a long time since my cinematography classes.

One of the reasons that you can get more out of a big and complex camera than you can get out of a phone camera is that the artist taking the picture can control what is and isn't out of focus. Be very small lens in the phone. Camera makes much more of the world being focused by default, and it makes a picture. That's much harder to screw up. That's why someone can be a very bad photographer with a good camera. But everybody is an okay photographer with their phone.

And then there's that effect, I think it's called tilt-shift, it's the thing where it makes everything look like it's tiny even though it's a picture of the real world. This is done by drawing a imaginary line through the image and keeping everything on that line in focus including the thing you want the person to be looking at (that line can't be horizontal or vertical) and then blurring everything above and below that line. You can take a picture of a city street and make it look like it's all made out of miniature models. This is because when something is close the depth of field takes things out of focus at shorter distances. So when the picture is deliberately blurred that way your brain tells you it's close and small.

Your brain restructures the image due to the forced alteration of focus.

I don't remember taxi driver that clearly. But when you got wide and establishing shots of interiors the camera is usually fairly far away and the depth of field can make the entire room look like it's in focus. But when you come into a two shot , or a close-up where the point of action is on one of the left or right third light of the screen. Your eye is naturally drawn to that and ignores the fact that everything on the other third-line is blurry. And virtually nothing is focused behind a near objective in an exterior scene.

The reason it's different from scene to scene is because the cinematographer wants your eyes to be in certain places and wants your brain to blot out certain signals. So they choose lenses and settings to tell your brain what to see. That may not actually be what you would see in real life.

The reason some movies feel cheap while you're watching them is because of bad cinematography. Too much in focus or too much out of focus At the same time Cheapish feeling movies are also a result of a whole bunch of terrible soun design as well.

Once you're sensitized to it, you can tell whether something was filmed with actual film or videotape or whatever. It becomes super obvious, and for the first year after you take a cinematography course, it's really hard to watch any sort of movie at all.

Lenses, iris size, amount of available light, these are facts of physics. In talented hands, you can be easily deceived. In inexperienced hands. You can miss everything.

Life is weird once you notice it. Movies are extra weird once you learn all the tricks.

The complete absence of field in an extremely zoomed in image can lead to some truly bizarre experiences. One of the more famous pictures in this area is an extreme zoom in to the distant end of a stadium. There are a bunch of students randomly positioned on a set of bleachers on a sunny day, but they look like they're directly on top of one another instead of on a surface that slants back away from the camera.

If you think I'm full of crazy well you can think that all you'd like. But if you take a course and cinematography you'll learn what to look for and life will look completely different to you.

I know you're saying to yourself that I'm wrong for you're different but the physics of lenses and refraction mean that you're not.

And if you take about half an hour of Google time and pursue focus and depth of field in cinematography, you'll discover many fascinating things.