In "The Moviegoers," a bleak New Yorker article from
a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of
movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular
taste. According to Denby, the commercialization of the whole enterprise has
brought about a brand of slicked-up, dumbed-down cinema that he and his friends
would never have stood for as younger, engaged moviegoers. "As I listen to people
talk (well, let's say older people)," he wrote, "I get the sense that many
moviegoers who loved the French, Italian, Japanese, British and Eastern European
films of the Sixties and the American films of the Seventies...have simply stopped