My desire, as always, is that those films will speak to many others. I just know that the movies on my list are the ones that spoke to me the way that movies always have: with glowing emotion, and with cascading force. Does that make the connection any less meaningful? I have no easy answer. Yet the dream of movies (the nature of them) is also to extend inward that dream suggests movies that will connect with increasingly fragmented cults of passion. The dream of movies (the nature of them) is to extend outward that dream suggests movies that masses of people can, and will, embrace. I raise the issue because it’s destined to haunt any film critic, in 2017, who’s compiling a 10 Best list. It began to shift dramatically around the time of “The Hurt Locker” (the lowest-grossing best picture winner in history), and by now, when the tastes reflected by the Oscars, or even the Golden Globes, turn out to parallel, with eerie precision, the tastes of the Independent Spirit or the Gotham Awards, it’s easy to be nagged at by the sensation that quality in movies is becoming more and more of a rarefied and even boutique thing, severed from the pulse of the mainstream embrace. Two or three decades ago, a tasteful big-hit tearjerker like “Wonder” would have been a shoo-in, and when the honors went to movies that were true works of art, like “The Godfather” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or “The Silence of the Lambs” or “Schindler’s List,” you’d better believe that they were movies enjoyed by gargantuan audiences.Īll of that is now changing. The Academy Awards, for most of their existence, used to be all about hitting the middlebrow sweet spot. We’ve seen this reflected, quite strikingly, by a subtle chemical change in the kinds of films that now dominate the awards season. Yet a lot of people might say, “Get over it.” More than ever, there’s a casual acceptance among moviegoers of the division between popularity and acclaim: between the mainstream and the art-stream. When you ponder the landscape of cinema as it exists today, it can feel as if a movie like “Get Out” or “Dunkirk,” and - indeed - the holy trinity of popularity, acclaim, and relevance, which used to go such a long way toward defining movies as an art form, now lines up about as often as an eclipse. Yet let’s just come out and acknowledge that this sort of thing now happens with dramatically less frequency than it used to.
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