How much money is the right amount to make a movie? How much time should it take to shoot one? How long should it take to write and refine a screenplay? And what’s the artistic price of sketchy writing, scant budgeting, and rapid shooting? Those are the challenging questions that one of the luminaries of the modern cinema, Dustin Hoffman, brings up in an interview that appeared in the Independent last week:

It’s hard to believe you can do good work for the little amount of money these days. We did The Graduate and that film still sustains, it had a wonderful script that they spent three years on, and an exceptional director with an exceptional cast and crew, but it was a small movie, four walls and actors, that is all, and yet it was 100 days of shooting.

His remarks are only the latest in a series of laments that have more commonly been offered up by critics regarding the death of the so-called midrange drama—realistic movies, likely rated R, featuring stars and name directors, on which all the main participants are paid substantially and work fully within the traditional norms of the industry, with large crews, vast complements of equipment, and a protracted shoot schedule.

Such films are still being made (“The Wolf of Wall Street” cost $125 million, “Gone Girl” cost $61 million, “American Sniper” cost $58 million) but they’re rare, and one reason that they’re rare is that many such movies—including some of the best of them—are doing poorly at the box office. (For instance, Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” cost $55 million to make and took in $36 million at the domestic box office; Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” cost $75 million and took in $51 million at the domestic box office; Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” cost $60 million and took in less than half that amount; Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” cost around $30 million and took in half as much.) Another crucial reason for the decline of midrange dramas is the increasing globalization of the movie market. Dramas and comedies tend to be culturally specific, and therefore less marketable in other countries, whereas action films and comic-book films, set in fantasy landscapes and featuring relatively little dialogue, are ready-made for worldwide distribution.

Yet the history of cinema is the history of bad business put to good artistic ends. Buster Keaton’s “The General” and “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” had high budgets, didn’t make them back, and resulted in Keaton working under strict studio supervision from then on. Many enduring masterworks, from “The Rules of the Game” and “Monsieur Verdoux” to “Vertigo” and “Playtime,” were expensive to make and didn’t earn their budgets back at the time of their release. Some of the most spectacular financial flameouts in movie history, such as “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar,” are also mighty artistic achievements that were dwarfed, both in their own times and later, in the scuttlebutt of received wisdom, by the stories of their profligate productions. The films mentioned above—including those of Eastwood, Anderson, Anderson, and Apatow—are masterworks, movies that will endure in the history of cinema even if they didn’t make money for their investors at the time of their release. There’s no connection between the short-term appeal of a movie and its artistic importance. Some aesthetic landmarks are profitable, some aren’t.

But there’s another twist in the tale of the declining budget for ambitious movies: the aesthetic virtues that often arise from the creative challenges that a lack of cash imposes. The low budget, furnished by financiers outside the studios’ executive suites, provides filmmakers with freedom—they don’t have to bend themselves into pretzels to assure producers of the commercial premise of their project. (Steven Soderbergh, in his famous speech at the 2013 San Francisco Film Festival, sketched the rhetorical ploys of the studio pitch.) The filmmakers themselves, their talent and their concerns, are the center of the production, not the commercial hook or the selling point. In exchange for financial restrictions, they get artistic leeway.

That leeway also often provides a classic mother-of-invention scenario that itself inflects the completed films. Movie-making is no mere depiction of actors performing scenes. It’s a resonant whole that extends beyond the frame to reflect the conditions of its production. Working with a low budget, filmmakers often need to invent new ways of working, and those methods themselves frequently prove inspiring. Wes Anderson returned from “The Life Aquatic” with “The Darjeeling Limited,” which he made on a spare budget and with looser production methods (but no less meticulous a style), and he continued in that vein with “Moonrise Kingdom,” a period piece done with his usually high attention to detail but in which the rough-edged production lent the film a nearly evangelical urgency.

Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” a high-budget film, was a commercial failure. His response was to make “The Wrestler,” on a mere $6 million, and then, “Black Swan,” for about twice that. In the process, he revitalized his artistry: those films had the feel of the hand in their production (regardless of the vast amounts of C.G.I. used in “Black Swan”). Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike,” made for $7 million, similarly has a physicality that’s both apt to the subject and that conveys a sort of artistic self-renewal. Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer,” which he made with a few hundred thousand of his own dollars, has a rare and furious vitality; “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” the fruit of his Kickstarter campaign, nearly shrieks with intensity.

Cheapness and its cinematic markers (such as hand-held camera work, low light or bland light or high-contrast light) aren’t themselves guarantors of a tone of artistic authenticity. In fact, they’re often misused by filmmakers short of inspiration as badges of sincerity that take the place of actual artistry. Yet the glossy hermeticism and theatrical realism of many older, ostensibly classic movies have dated terribly and reflect the very exclusions and compromises of the system that produced them. (Only the ingenious exertions and inventions of a slender minority of great filmmakers circumvent and override them.)

Movies from all ages of the history of the medium are more readily available than ever, and the best critics are more widely and deeply informed about that history than critics have ever been. But, often, in lieu of a judicious and discerning enthusiasm for the intermittent (but plentiful) artistic achievements of the classic Hollywood era, many critics who absorb vast quantities of studio-era movies fetishize the styles and take the results and the methods of studio filmmaking for an enduring and immutable aesthetic standard—as if, along with an appreciation of Shakespeare came a comparable fixation on lesser Elizabethans and a disdain for latter-day dramatists for not writing in iambic pentameter.