The system is broken. High-quality, mid-budget prestige movies are an endangered species. Television is better. Audiences are fleeing. Film is dying. Sequels are ruining everything. These are some of the familiar objections that surface whenever critics, media journalists and other entertainment pundits take stock of the big picture, an appraisal that often turns into agony over the (inevitably worsening) state of the art and industry. What everyone agrees on is that “they” don’t make movies like they used to.

Except of course when they do. The American movie business is strange, contradictory, exasperating and sometimes infuriating, yet somehow, miraculously, it continues to create enough work to fill the top 10 lists that critics compile at the end of each year. Those movies are too often treated as outliers. But as we emerge from a summer of broken box-office records into a crowded, cautiously promising fall season, it’s time to take another look at how and when this system does work — at least well enough to produce movies that satisfy public and critical appetites and that make the continued case for cinema as the most vital and significant mass art.

Image Credit... Harry Campbell

Because for all the changes in the on-demand, multiplatform, streaming, fluid entertainment media world, the one constant is that the movies continue to have a profound hold on us. And they hold us the way they have for the past century — with visual style, narrative techniques, bigger-than-life stars, human stories and familiar genres — except that where once the studio biopic mythologized Madame Curie it now does the same for Ice Cube. The movies entertain us, bore us, transport us, move and enrage us, divert us from the world’s problems or inspire us to solve them. They remain, in other words and in spite of everything, one of the sublime pleasures of modern life.