10 ms·

Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix

80 points by jslakro 10mo ago

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Related: Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
dosinga 10mo ago
Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight
- throwaway894345 10mo ago
  When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
  - speedgoose 10mo ago
    Poop doesn’t get better with age. But you have good movies in the 2010s.
    - phantasmish 10mo ago
      I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
      - aceazzameen 10mo ago
        Fury Road definitely counts in my book.
      - throwaway894345 10mo ago
        I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
        phantasmish 10mo ago
        Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
  - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
    It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter. You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you. ‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
    - throwaway894345 10mo ago
      How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
  - zorked 10mo ago
    You will forget the bad movies, remember the good movies, and describe the 2010s as a great era.
    - throwaway894345 10mo ago
      Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
- adzm 10mo ago
  Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources. Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
  - quantummagic 10mo ago
    > Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
- D13Fd 10mo ago
  I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were. Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them. Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today. Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
  - tuveson 10mo ago
    Escape from New York is the good one (in my opinion anyway)
  - beej71 10mo ago
    There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
- Fricken 10mo ago
  The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes. Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
- SamuelAdams 10mo ago
  This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
  - whilenot-dev 10mo ago
    The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office: - Blade Runner (1982) - Brazil (1985) - Donnie Darko (2001) - Fight Club (1999) - The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - The Thing (1982) The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films
    - ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
      I think Hollywood is well past its prime and the best films are either independent or from elsewhere. As to a modern cult film, I think "Everything Everywhere All At Once" should make the list.
carlosjobim 10mo ago
Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
- throwaway894345 10mo ago
  I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
- aunty_helen 10mo ago
  I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow. Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
  - luqtas 10mo ago
    i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
  - mcphage 10mo ago
    > Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow. I believe it felt slow when it originally released as well.
- Barrin92 10mo ago
  It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes. Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
karakot 10mo ago
NFLX series and AI slop are converging fast.
solfox 10mo ago
It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.
- hyperhello 10mo ago
  Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.
sema4hacker 10mo ago
Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  > movies in general are now produced more frequently I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.
kridsdale1 10mo ago
In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously. Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800. Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos. Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.
- phony-account 10mo ago
  > Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. Let me introduce you to some film history: https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
  - floren 10mo ago
    Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"
  - jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
    -1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting. A focal plane mere inches thick! Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should! But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.
speedgoose 10mo ago
> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything. I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy. I think we have some bias too. We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
- EA-3167 10mo ago
  I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had. Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else. The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world. That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
- snicky 10mo ago
  > The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too. I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
matt_daemon 10mo ago
Anecdotally one thing I’ve noticed is that older films had much fewer characters. Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships
- christkv 10mo ago
  They are also shorter which means they don’t overstay their welcome
- whilenot-dev 10mo ago
  Movies with stories about building chemistry and relationships just need fewer characters. They still exist: - All of Us Strangers (2023) - Aftersun (2022) - The Lighthouse (2019) - Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019) - The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
mandevil 10mo ago
A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?
- politelemon 10mo ago
  > he just stopped walking with a limp Remind me where this is from, this sounds really familiar.
  - giggyhack 10mo ago
    The Usual Suspects
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - genghisjahn 10mo ago
    I have a memory of this but, just like that,"whuh"...it's gone.
  - jyap 10mo ago
    The Usual Suspects
  - dylanfw 10mo ago
    To avoid spoiling a 30 year old movie: ROT13 `Gur Hfhny Fhfcrpgf`
  - daseiner1 10mo ago
    would you say that you’re feeling sort of… “spacey”?
Animats 10mo ago
There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.
thomassmith65 10mo ago
One problem, of several, is that there just was more point in doing things, meeting people, and going places up until a decade ago. If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.
tetris11 10mo ago
> I think the difference comes down to this: older movies took risks. They trusted audiences to pay attention, to feel something, to think. Scorsese and Tarantino had visions and the freedom to execute them without endless studio interference. They weren't chasing demographics or worrying about franchise potential. They were making films, not products. By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP. I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.
asciimov 10mo ago
If you think the stories in 90's movies are good, you need spend some time with classic era movies (pre-1970). When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.
- floren 10mo ago
  I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.
jmward01 10mo ago
I think some of it may be that everything is too big now and they all have too many options they can, relatively, easily take. When special effects became easy every movie turned into an action movie. Special effects are everywhere creating scenes that don't actually help tell the story or develop a character. It just seems like there aren't hard choices being made to force a movie to be its core best self. Every scene should matter. Of course we can't go back though. I don't think many people would pay to see the something like Jaws again.
expedition32 10mo ago
There's that incredibly funny/sad clip of the old actor playing Gandalf getting frustrated with talking into thin air. Half of modern movies literally only exist on the special effects laptop. But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
Important distinction: This specifically applies to Netflix movies; these are explicitly aimed at people watching in the background, or listening without watching. The conclusions don't apply to modern movies as a whole.
bentt 10mo ago
There is only so much top talent to go around. We cannot have infinite new content at the same quality as the best Hollywood could do in the 90s.
- duxup 10mo ago
  I'm inclined to agree, although I have to wonder where the money is going. Seeing plenty of BIG budget shows and movies where the dialogue and writing are just dreadful ... I gotta think those shows and movies could have outbid for better talent, but they just chose not to when it came to the creative team. I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
  - bentt 10mo ago
    My bet is that the content schedule and need to fill the pipeline is so much faster that decisions get made hastily in service of metrics. You can call it Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t make it so.
haunter 10mo ago
I've seen many good films this decade too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020 Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021 The two Dune films Alcarràs 2022 Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022 Monster (怪物) 2023 Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023 The Holdovers 2023 Perfect Days 2023 The Substance 2024 Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
- mcphage 10mo ago
  Let me add in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022)
  - haunter 10mo ago
    I didn't like that at all :') As one of the characters said "it’s all just a pointless swirling bucket of bullshit"
    - mcphage 10mo ago
      Different strokes for different folks, I guess :-)
CupricTea 10mo ago
The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast. * Many more shots from eye level * Significantly less jumpcuts * People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously * Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
- milleramp 10mo ago
  It's also color grading that has changed. https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x
  - ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
    More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
- atombender 10mo ago
  While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days. Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic". I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs. Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality. In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth. It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
uwagar 10mo ago
how does 90s movie compare with say 60s movies that would be interesting too.
- christkv 10mo ago
  60s has so many good movies like 2001, psycho etc etc. it’s really the last 5-7 years where I feel the quality took a dive
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
arnonejoe 10mo ago
Maybe it’s in part because films from the 80s and 90s were filmed on actual film.
- jslakro 10mo ago
  I've started to think that this might be a good reason.
christkv 10mo ago
Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.
deleted 10mo ago
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christkv 10mo ago
Movies also have gotten to long. I long for 5he days of 90 min. It also meant cinemas could run more movies and had space for smaller releases too.
wkat4242 10mo ago
Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore. But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series. There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.
woodpanel 10mo ago
These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling. > I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
silexia 10mo ago
The reason these older movies are better stories is because American culture used to be much more merit based and free market based. Now, half the decision in hiring a director, actors, writers is what is their identity. Return to pure competition and movies will improve.
DrierCycle 10mo ago
Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances. Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.
burnto 10mo ago
The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose. Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users. We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…
PorterBHall 10mo ago
Gen Z discovers nostalgia.
M95D 10mo ago
I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.
- tim333 10mo ago
  I thought Max Max Fury Road was cool. Though they spent crazy money on vehicles for that so maybe it agrees with your point. I mean Max 1 is ok https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93 https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93 But fury was kind of epic https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118 https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118 both seem to have some ramps and explosions.
  - TiredOfLife 10mo ago
    Majority if not all shots in fury road are heavily cgi enhanced if not fully cgi.
    - tim333 10mo ago
      Dunno - this thing says mostly real https://fraserengineco.com/fraser-fast-facts/mad-max-fury-road/ https://fraserengineco.com/fraser-fast-facts/mad-max-fury-ro... Here's some making of where you can see the real shot and the cgi https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=656 https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=656 Even some of the explosions I thought would be fake was them actually blowing stuff up https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=1278 https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=1278 I'm not sure if the making of shots aren't more impressive than the end verisons.
  - DHPersonal 10mo ago
    What’s funny to me is how many hidden ramps are featured in that Mad Max 1 trailer :)
mr3martinis 10mo ago
Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.
kouru225 10mo ago
How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?” The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them. The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
kwertyoowiyop 10mo ago
Yes it’s nostalgia. You’re comparing your all-time favorite classics to not-as-good new movies.
CHB0403085482 10mo ago
It's ok. Anime will save netflix... right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaoUt_Suv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaoUt_Suv4
homeonthemtn 10mo ago
Modern movies aren't allowed breathing room. Watch something from the 70s versus now. We absolutely blast people with dialogue and spoon feed action sequences. Older movies has silence in moments. Casual conversation. People weren't trying to pack in maximum information through close up monologues disguised as dialogue.

80 points by jslakro 10mo ago

Related: Why movies just don't feel "real" anymore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863

dosinga 10mo ago

Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight

throwaway894345 10mo ago
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
- speedgoose 10mo ago
  Poop doesn’t get better with age. But you have good movies in the 2010s.
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
    - aceazzameen 10mo ago
      Fury Road definitely counts in my book.
    - throwaway894345 10mo ago
      I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
      - phantasmish 10mo ago
        Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago
  It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter. You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you. ‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
  - throwaway894345 10mo ago
    How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
- zorked 10mo ago
  You will forget the bad movies, remember the good movies, and describe the 2010s as a great era.
  - throwaway894345 10mo ago
    Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
adzm 10mo ago
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources. Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
- quantummagic 10mo ago
  > Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
D13Fd 10mo ago
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were. Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them. Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today. Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
- tuveson 10mo ago
  Escape from New York is the good one (in my opinion anyway)
- beej71 10mo ago
  There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
Fricken 10mo ago
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes. Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
SamuelAdams 10mo ago
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2025_box_office_number...
- whilenot-dev 10mo ago
  The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office: - Blade Runner (1982) - Brazil (1985) - Donnie Darko (2001) - Fight Club (1999) - The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - The Thing (1982) The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cult_films
  - ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
    I think Hollywood is well past its prime and the best films are either independent or from elsewhere. As to a modern cult film, I think "Everything Everywhere All At Once" should make the list.

carlosjobim 10mo ago

Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.

throwaway894345 10mo ago
I just watched “While You Were Sleeping” with my wife while we decorated for Christmas. It was still better than 99.9% of movies from this decade and it’s not because the plot is particularly sophisticated.
aunty_helen 10mo ago
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow. Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
- luqtas 10mo ago
  i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
- mcphage 10mo ago
  > Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow. I believe it felt slow when it originally released as well.
Barrin92 10mo ago
It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes. Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.

karakot 10mo ago

NFLX series and AI slop are converging fast.

solfox 10mo ago

It’s ironic that the word choice and structure of this article feels overly embellished in that very chatgpt style… I miss the old days of people writing their own content.

hyperhello 10mo ago
Presenting fake content as though it were real is the major use of AI right now. You can ask it to write a breathless ten-paragraph post about the plot of The Godfather, for example, and it will instantly give you something shovel ready for a bot-enriched Facebook creator.

sema4hacker 10mo ago

Good movies aren't created often, while movies in general are now produced more frequently, so unimpressive movies are much easier to bump into. I just saw a chart showing over twice as many movies were released in 2018 as in 2000. It would be interesting to see for each IMDB decade what percentage of films are rated 8 or higher.

dylan604 10mo ago
> movies in general are now produced more frequently I don't agree with this. Blockbuster used to be filled with movies made to go straight to "home video" whether that was VHS or DVD. Shitty movies have been made for a really long time. Typically, they didn't have a budget and no studio was involved. Now, we have really shitty movies with incredible budgets being released by the studios as well as whatever the streamers are making. The straight to home video market does seem to have lost a bit though as they still need to find a streamer willing to license it.

kridsdale1 10mo ago

In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously. Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800. Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos. Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.

phony-account 10mo ago
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. Let me introduce you to some film history: https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/ https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
- floren 10mo ago
  Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"
- jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
  -1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting. A focal plane mere inches thick! Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should! But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.

speedgoose 10mo ago

> Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe I'm romanticizing the past. But when I finish a good movie, I can sit there thinking about them for hours, even days depending on the movie. When I finish most modern blockbusters, I'm already thinking about dinner. And that difference, I think, says everything. I don’t watch modern most blockbusters because I don’t enjoy them in general. I watch a few that I know I will likely enjoy. I think we have some bias too. We remember better the good experiences. The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.

EA-3167 10mo ago
I think you're hitting the nail on the head, but the corollary is that there's so much MORE now. More of everything, and since most things are crap the gems are proportionally harder to find. I look at reality tv and wince, but I also feel that way about soap operas, it's the same itch being scratched the same way for a different generation. But the nature of reality tv (dirt cheap) means that it's been made in vast quantities, dwarfing the reach that soap operas ever had. Soap operas weren't choking out late night comedy, they were totally different products serving different needs, at different times. Reality tv changes that equation though, with the aforementioned cheapness, and perennial popularity. A lot of the old norms are gone too, around residuals, the "one for them, one for me" system, stars vs brand... and the result is often entertainment geared at cheap production and nothing else. The other issue is that CGI, while it empowers amazing things, also empowers the creation of real trash. It's allowed Marvel movies to film without a complete script, figuring out the ending in AVR and CGI work... and it shows. A lot of old blockbusters were crap, but they were crap that at least had the requisite craftsmanship to be made and distributed to theaters around the world. That barrier is gone, the gates are open and that means that hidden voices are emerging (hooray!) and also that a lot of people are so inundated by noise that they disengage.
snicky 10mo ago
> The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too. I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.

matt_daemon 10mo ago

Anecdotally one thing I’ve noticed is that older films had much fewer characters. Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships

christkv 10mo ago
They are also shorter which means they don’t overstay their welcome
whilenot-dev 10mo ago
Movies with stories about building chemistry and relationships just need fewer characters. They still exist: - All of Us Strangers (2023) - Aftersun (2022) - The Lighthouse (2019) - Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019) - The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

mandevil 10mo ago

A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?

politelemon 10mo ago
> he just stopped walking with a limp Remind me where this is from, this sounds really familiar.
- giggyhack 10mo ago
  The Usual Suspects
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- genghisjahn 10mo ago
  I have a memory of this but, just like that,"whuh"...it's gone.
- jyap 10mo ago
  The Usual Suspects
- dylanfw 10mo ago
  To avoid spoiling a 30 year old movie: ROT13 `Gur Hfhny Fhfcrpgf`
- daseiner1 10mo ago
  would you say that you’re feeling sort of… “spacey”?

Animats 10mo ago

There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.

thomassmith65 10mo ago

One problem, of several, is that there just was more point in doing things, meeting people, and going places up until a decade ago. If you make a movie set in 2025, the screenwriter has to jump through hoops to avoid real life, which much of the time is someone quietly staring at a screen.

tetris11 10mo ago

> I think the difference comes down to this: older movies took risks. They trusted audiences to pay attention, to feel something, to think. Scorsese and Tarantino had visions and the freedom to execute them without endless studio interference. They weren't chasing demographics or worrying about franchise potential. They were making films, not products. By risks, you mean they weren't just following tropes, but subverting them, inventing their own, not rehashing exist IP. I think that's the difference. Execs have run out of ideas, and so hedge on the familiar.

asciimov 10mo ago

If you think the stories in 90's movies are good, you need spend some time with classic era movies (pre-1970). When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.

floren 10mo ago
I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.

jmward01 10mo ago

I think some of it may be that everything is too big now and they all have too many options they can, relatively, easily take. When special effects became easy every movie turned into an action movie. Special effects are everywhere creating scenes that don't actually help tell the story or develop a character. It just seems like there aren't hard choices being made to force a movie to be its core best self. Every scene should matter. Of course we can't go back though. I don't think many people would pay to see the something like Jaws again.

expedition32 10mo ago

There's that incredibly funny/sad clip of the old actor playing Gandalf getting frustrated with talking into thin air. Half of modern movies literally only exist on the special effects laptop. But movies have always been about technology. I am sure Fritz Lang was considered a hack once.

the__alchemist 10mo ago

Important distinction: This specifically applies to Netflix movies; these are explicitly aimed at people watching in the background, or listening without watching. The conclusions don't apply to modern movies as a whole.

bentt 10mo ago

There is only so much top talent to go around. We cannot have infinite new content at the same quality as the best Hollywood could do in the 90s.

duxup 10mo ago
I'm inclined to agree, although I have to wonder where the money is going. Seeing plenty of BIG budget shows and movies where the dialogue and writing are just dreadful ... I gotta think those shows and movies could have outbid for better talent, but they just chose not to when it came to the creative team. I'm thinking of productions like Star Wars Acolyte where the story and writing were just dreadful ... and they spent an enormous amount of money on it.
- bentt 10mo ago
  My bet is that the content schedule and need to fill the pipeline is so much faster that decisions get made hastily in service of metrics. You can call it Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t make it so.

haunter 10mo ago

I've seen many good films this decade too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020 Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021 The two Dune films Alcarràs 2022 Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022 Monster (怪物) 2023 Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023 The Holdovers 2023 Perfect Days 2023 The Substance 2024 Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)

phantasmish 10mo ago
Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
mcphage 10mo ago
Let me add in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022)
- haunter 10mo ago
  I didn't like that at all :') As one of the characters said "it’s all just a pointless swirling bucket of bullshit"
  - mcphage 10mo ago
    Different strokes for different folks, I guess :-)

CupricTea 10mo ago

The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast. * Many more shots from eye level * Significantly less jumpcuts * People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously * Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.

milleramp 10mo ago
It's also color grading that has changed. https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949863
atombender 10mo ago
While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days. Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic". I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs. Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality. In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth. It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.

uwagar 10mo ago

how does 90s movie compare with say 60s movies that would be interesting too.

christkv 10mo ago
60s has so many good movies like 2001, psycho etc etc. it’s really the last 5-7 years where I feel the quality took a dive
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

arnonejoe 10mo ago

Maybe it’s in part because films from the 80s and 90s were filmed on actual film.

jslakro 10mo ago
I've started to think that this might be a good reason.

christkv 10mo ago

Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

christkv 10mo ago

Movies also have gotten to long. I long for 5he days of 90 min. It also meant cinemas could run more movies and had space for smaller releases too.

wkat4242 10mo ago

Yeah I noticed that. The characters are also super one-dimensional, constantly repeating the same expressions. I think it's because people don't have the same attention span anymore. But it's just really terrible. Stuff like reacher who solves every problem with violence (I think South park even did a piece on that). Or Amazon with their big list of spinoffs of one really mediocre spy series. There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK but they're few and far between.

woodpanel 10mo ago

These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling. > I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.

silexia 10mo ago

The reason these older movies are better stories is because American culture used to be much more merit based and free market based. Now, half the decision in hiring a director, actors, writers is what is their identity. Return to pure competition and movies will improve.

DrierCycle 10mo ago

Movies were made to make a high majority of profits in theaters, a captive audience that had few distractions and optics developed for composite nuances. Listen to the soft wind mixed in under Jodie's lambs tale. It comes on slowly, builds and then rapidly fades. 100s of details like these were managed for reaching audiences out of their range of conscious awareness. That's how movies used to get made. Now everything is developed to look at, to notice. And if it isn't, it's in a mode of realism that's basic.

burnto 10mo ago

The 90s films mentioned in this post are works of art and the actors and creators were artists. Compensation sustains the art, but it’s not the primary purpose. Netflix is a business. The content on Netflix is largely designed or purchased with a primary goal of engaging paying users. We can find plenty of films that are works of art after the 90s. One Battle After Another is a recent one that comes to mind. Parasite, No Country for Old Men, Arrival, Moonlight, Tree of Life, Midsommar, Mandy…

PorterBHall 10mo ago

Gen Z discovers nostalgia.

M95D 10mo ago

I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.

tim333 10mo ago
I thought Max Max Fury Road was cool. Though they spent crazy money on vehicles for that so maybe it agrees with your point. I mean Max 1 is ok https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93 https://youtu.be/Utj2o2eWdC0?t=93 But fury was kind of epic https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118 https://youtu.be/hEJnMQG9ev8?t=118 both seem to have some ramps and explosions.
- TiredOfLife 10mo ago
  Majority if not all shots in fury road are heavily cgi enhanced if not fully cgi.
  - tim333 10mo ago
    Dunno - this thing says mostly real https://fraserengineco.com/fraser-fast-facts/mad-max-fury-road/ https://fraserengineco.com/fraser-fast-facts/mad-max-fury-ro... Here's some making of where you can see the real shot and the cgi https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=656 https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=656 Even some of the explosions I thought would be fake was them actually blowing stuff up https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=1278 https://youtu.be/hsFc76R7W6E?t=1278 I'm not sure if the making of shots aren't more impressive than the end verisons.
- DHPersonal 10mo ago
  What’s funny to me is how many hidden ramps are featured in that Mad Max 1 trailer :)

mr3martinis 10mo ago

Herzog talks about actually hauling the boat over the hill in Fitzcaraldo because audiences can tell real from fake. Nowadays even movies that don’t use special effects rely much more on editing and post processing. Movies shot on film feel more connected to what actually happened on set.

kouru225 10mo ago

How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?” The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them. The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.

kwertyoowiyop 10mo ago

Yes it’s nostalgia. You’re comparing your all-time favorite classics to not-as-good new movies.

CHB0403085482 10mo ago

It's ok. Anime will save netflix... right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaoUt_Suv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaoUt_Suv4

homeonthemtn 10mo ago

Modern movies aren't allowed breathing room. Watch something from the 70s versus now. We absolutely blast people with dialogue and spoon feed action sequences. Older movies has silence in moments. Casual conversation. People weren't trying to pack in maximum information through close up monologues disguised as dialogue.