It’s always cheering to read an interview with an actor who has reached a stage of their career where they no longer worry about toeing the line. True classics of the genre include barn-busting interviews with Teri Garr (select nuggets: Francis Ford Coppola was “a humourless Italian guy”, Sydney Pollack was “sexist”, Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson “plagiarised” Bruce Conner); Bronson Pinchot (“We thought Tom Cruise was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth”); and most recently, Kathleen Turner (Nicolas Cage “was that asshole”).

Why are we so afraid to make a distinction between art and entertainment?

To this list we can now add Ethan Hawke, who on his recent press tour for First Reformed has begun to give off the heartening air of one who no longer cares. In a bracing interview with GQ, he opined that “young [actors] make the mistake in that they sell out before they even know what it is they’re selling out for”, and castigated the De Niro and Pacino generation of actors for making commercial films long after they’ve stopped needing the money. Now, in an act of burn-it-all-down bravura, he’s turned to superhero films, the meat and drink of the film industry, arguing that they can only be so good, but will always be hidebound by their genre. Taking a pop at the X-Men spin-off Logan, Hawke had the audacity to say: “Well, it’s a great superhero movie. It still involves people in tights with metal coming out of their hands. It’s not Bresson. It’s not Bergman.”

‘How do you assess a superhero juggernaut?’ The Avengers, 2012. Photograph: REX/c.W.Disney/Everett

First off, due credit to Hawke for doubling down and citing two dead European directors, in a move almost calculated to amplify the internet’s frothing tenfold. Of course, for a great number of the famously level-headed people who dwell on the web, there could be no worse an opinion than the belief that a vastly budgeted behemoth about a big buff claw-man might not be a work of art equal to Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a film they have definitely seen. Consequently – which is hilarious, because Hawke probably doesn’t even own a smartphone – the star of the Before trilogy copped a lot of flak on Twitter for his supposedly elitist and highfalutin worldview. For another section of people, including this writer, Hawke’s statement felt like a glass of cold water after a walk through the desert: no working critic would dare voice this perfectly sensible opinion in 2018 for fear of online ridicule, and perhaps because some publications are so keen to keep readers and the studios onside.

The fact is that big studio releases are squashing out smaller films. The blockbusters of today are different beasts to those of yore, as Stephen Metcalf notes in an indispensable article for the New Yorker, which shows how superhero franchises have risen to become all-conquering, failure-proof titans at the box office. Metcalf observes that the dearth of quality dramas for grownups in cinemas is being counterbalanced by a rise in ambitious TV dramas, and concludes: “A minimal standard of human relatability is not being met, on a routine basis, in the medium’s most dominant genre. People who are nothing like us rescuing a world that is nothing like ours is not a recipe for artistic renewal.”

To me, the sense in this is inarguable. In a world where certain films are wholly critic-proof, how do you assess a superhero juggernaut? Is Avengers 7: The Interminable Revenge of Whatever to be considered relative to superhero films only, or to the whole field of cinema? It goes without saying that certain superhero films are better than others – but it should not be a cause for Siberian banishment to suggest that one, given the well-trodden commercial formulae to which the genre unstintingly adheres, might not ever earn a spot on the Sight & Sound Top 50. Why are we so afraid to make a distinction between art and entertainment? The recent creation of a new Oscar for Best Popular Film, which will presumably crown some big CGI hoopla every year, shows that the Academy also has major collywobbles about this question.

The answer to the surge in superhero films isn’t to infantilise their fans by claiming that they have any great claims to cinematic artistry, but for our reviewing to step up, and give a strong, coherent, critical assessment of the genre.

• Caspar Salmon is a film writer based in London