Martin Scorsese has forgotten more films than I’ve seen and seen more films than I’ve heard of. His knowledge of movies is vast, as a viewer, and, obviously, as a filmmaker. He’s been making features for almost fifty years, and the authority of his experience in the business isn’t to be gainsaid. But he misses the mark in a recent essay in the Hollywood Reporter, in which he inveighs against two conjoined trends—the widespread reporting of box-office results and the grading of movies by consumers on CinemaScore and by critics on Rotten Tomatoes—and blames it for “a tone that is hostile to serious filmmakers.” In particular, he contends that this hostile environment is worsening “as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene.” He also writes that directors are “reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.”

I think that film criticism is, over all, better than ever, because, with its new Internet-centrism, it’s more democratic than ever and many of the critics who write largely online are more film-curious than ever. Anyone who is active on so-called Film Twitter—who sees links by critics, mainly younger critics, to his or her work—can’t help but be impressed by the knowledge, the curiosity, and the sensibility of many of them. Their tastes tend to be broader and more daring than those of many senior critics on more established publications. And, even if readers of the wider press aren’t reading these more obscure critics, the critics whom general readers read are often reading those young critics (and if they’re not, it shows). This is, of course, not universally so, any more than it ever was. The Internet is democratic in all directions—it’s also available to writers of lesser knowledge, duller taste, and dubious agendas, and it may be their work that’s advertised most loudly—but the younger generation of critics is present online and there for the finding.

But I’m inclined to approach the phenomenon that Scorsese is describing differently—to work backward from the movies that are getting made, shown, and released, and to determine the nature of the current-day movie environment on that basis. Scorsese talks about the last twenty years; let’s scroll down the list of major releases in 1997, the year of “Titanic.” What are the masterworks that couldn’t be made or released now? “L. A. Confidential”? “Boogie Nights”? “Amistad”? “Starship Troopers”? “Jackie Brown”? “The Ice Storm”? The best films of 2017, such as “Get Out,” “Good Time,” “A Ghost Story,” “Song to Song,” and “Hermia & Helena,” are better—more original, more daring at the fundamental level of the image, of dramatic form, of the definition of performance, of the very stuff of the cinema (and that’s even leaving out the wondrously original strains of nonfiction cinema, such as “Rat Film,” “Strong Island,” and “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?”). But what distinguishes them from the best films of 1997 is that they weren’t made by studios. Rather, they were made by independent producers who furnished budgets much lower than the ones that leading directors worked with two decades ago.

The 2017 movies also, for the most part, reached far fewer viewers in movie theatres. “Get Out” has made lots of money, taking in a hundred and seventy-five million dollars at the domestic box-office (on a budget of four and a half million dollars); “A Ghost Story” has earned approximately a hundredth as much, taking in $1.6 million (but its production budget was . . . a hundred thousand dollars). But I agree with Scorsese: these box-office statistics are utterly irrelevant; “Get Out” and “A Ghost Story” are peers at the very height of the art of movies. Working with scant budgets frees filmmakers to follow their strongest artistic impulses and allows their films to be distinctive, personal, original. It’s all to the good that some of these films, such as “Moonlight” (which cost four million dollars to make and took in twenty-seven million dollars in domestic ticket sales, and another thirty-seven million dollars internationally) and “Get Out,” have also been very profitable.

I know of another such box-office-successful film, one that I consider to be among the best of all in recent years, and it’s directed by Martin Scorsese: “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It was an expensive film to make—its budget was reportedly a hundred million dollars—and it took in a hundred and sixteen million dollars in the United States, and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars internationally. Yet its budget didn’t come from the studio (Paramount) that released it but, rather, from independent financiers. I think it’s no coincidence that Scorsese, liberated from studio producers, also liberated his artistic energies and made one of his very best films.

In other words, the trend in criticism is the same as in movies: for the most part, the best of what’s available isn’t found in the so-called mainstream. That fact has economic implications, of exactly the sort that are reflected in the Safdie brothers’ extraordinary film “Good Time.” The film was made because its star, Robert Pattinson, who had box-office success and gained his stardom working in an altogether more popular and less artistically ambitious vein, asked the brothers to make a film with him; they then wrote it with him in mind, and his involvement secured the financing that they needed to make it. The best filmmakers are often not getting the checks for directing movies that they might have expected decades ago. (Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are among the major filmmakers who have directed TV commercials in recent years while they were between movies.) It’s exactly the movies that are made on low budgets and put into limited release that are more or less immune to the oversimplifications of grades on Rotten Tomatoes or CinemaScore. It’s hard to imagine that the viewers who are interested in “Good Time” or “Beach Rats” or “Columbus” would be anything but amused by such scores, and that they would be guided by such artificial consensus than by reading reviews by critics whose sensibility they find related to their own.

I don’t blame Scorsese for not being aware of what’s going on in criticism and, for that matter, in movies. He spent most of his career in one system and, though he has changed systems as a producer of movies, he may not have done so as a consumer of them. The very nature of movie viewing, as he says in the essay, has changed—he cites the over-all switch from 35-mm. film projection to video as a boon for independents but a “real loss” for viewers. What he doesn’t mention is that theatres themselves are secondary to audiences for movies. Though streaming services don’t provide numbers, it’s pretty clear that more people are watching movies at home than in theatres.

I went looking online for the box-office results for the best film of 2016, “Little Sister”; the answer I found, though not quite accurate—zero dollars—is an apt metaphor. The movie’s theatrical release was extremely limited, though it did have one. But that release happened concurrently with its release on Amazon and iTunes, where many more people have undoubtedly seen it. For the record, “Little Sister” has a ninety-two-per-cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with favorable reviews from critics at such major publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation. It also received favorable reviews from the aforementioned perceptive critics writing for smaller, often Internet-only publications.

What Scorsese doesn’t exactly say, but what, I think, marks a generation gap in movie thinking that his essay reflects, is the appearance of an increasing divide between artistically ambitious films and Hollywood films—the gap between the top box-office films and the award winners. (For instance, from an absolute perspective of profitability, “Moonlight” was a great success, and also an Oscar winner; but it was only at the ninety-second slot in domestic box-office for 2016 releases.) For filmmakers ready to work on lower budgets, the gap is irrelevant. The filmmakers whose conceptions tend toward the spectacular are the ones whose styles may, literally, be cramped by shrinking budgets—filmmakers such as Scorsese and Wes Anderson, whose work has both an original and elaborate sense of style and a grand historical reach.