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I agree with your examples. But here are some recent counterexamples. It’s a wildly idiosyncratic list, heavily influenced by some ongoing discussions with history teachers about good films on the Cold War era. As you skim the list, my contextual question to you is how many of these movies had you never heard of — and why not? Good movies are being made. They’re hiding in plain sight. How can they be elevated? Here’s my discussion starter list:

Columbus (2017; Kogonada, dir.); Leave No Trace (2018; Debra Granik, dir.); The Florida Project (2017, Sean Baker, dir.), The Professor and the Madman (2019; P.B. Shemran, dir.); Mr. Jones (2020; Agnieszka Holland, dir.), Balloon (2018, Michael Herbig, dir.), The Way Back (2010; Peter Weir, dir.), Downfall (2004; Oliver Hirschbiegel, dir.), The Death of Stalin (2017; Armando Iannucci, dir.), The Dig (2021, Simon Stone, dir.), Journey’s End (2017, Saul Dibb, dir.), Dear Comrades! (2020, Andrey Konchalovskiy, dir.), Ashes in the Snow (Marius A. Markevicius, dir.), Within the Whirlwind (2009, Marleen Gorris, dir.), Conspiracy (2001, Frank Pierson, dir.).

Films move around the various streaming platforms frequently. Many of them are available for free on Kanopy, which was a recent discovery for me. It’s a school and library oriented system with a great deal of older, art house and international content. It’s worth checking out; I have free access through the DC Public Library, which is a subscriber, and all I need is my card number. If your local library participates, it’s worth checking out. If all else fails, once they’re several years old, they’re usually pretty cheap to rent.

These are mostly Cold War related with a few personal favorites — Columbus, The Florida Project, Leave No Trace, The Professor and the Madman — thrown in. Except for Conspiracy (about the Wannsee Conference; 90 minutes of men in uniforms sitting around a table talking, and it is riveting) and Downfall — of which I was aware because of the YouTube parodies, but had never bothered to watch — these are all within the last dozen years or so. If you go back further, the list is endless, but I suggest these to folks who think that the modern film industry is a wasteland. These are good films; a few will be classics, but all of them are high quality. And this list is just a few that I’ve caught through casual searching. The point is, films like these are still being made. The dominant marketing and distribution systems, however, seem oriented towards pushing a very different kind of product, which means we have to ferret out the good stuff. From my perspective, at least, the industry is hyping mass market junk and not putting its best foot forward. The streamers accentuate this; they’re oriented towards a lowest common denominator product intended for a global audience.

Reviews are important. Film festivals are important. I never paid attention to them before, but I do now. The festivals are run by film fanatics who may be insufferably elitist and moronically PC in their politics, but they are all enamored of the idea of cinema as a high art. They want theatrical movies, not television serials. They are generally down on spandex clad superheroes and mindless action flicks. Sexual content is still a battleground, but at the level of the major festivals, the pendulum seems to be swinging back somewhat from the excesses of the past. That war will never be over, but look at the films broadly. Most of them are not oversexualized. (There are some exceptions.)

Cannes is on point now. Most of the Cannes movie list leaves me cold, but I do want to watch After Yang and The French Dispatch (in both cases, mainly as a vote of confidence in their directors). I will pay attention to reviews, prizes and “best of” lists for further leads. The burden is on us to find the good stuff, but it’s there if we look.