Douthat bids farewell to his side hustle as film critic for NR. He writes:

But over time, in spite of my resolution to stay positive, decline and decadence would become signal themes. The great superhero takeover of Hollywood began early in my run as a critic, and by the time we reached the days of Ant-Man and the Wasp, only a true philistine could deny that the comic-book era had changed Hollywood for the worse. So did the shuttered cinemas of the Covid-19 era, the reign of wokeness (whose clearest negative effects were manifest in children’s movies, which as a parent I took personally), the streaming-era migration of talent to the small screen, the fateful lure of smartphone scrolling, and the decline of the dating and socializing that once had made the movie theater a hub.

Living through cultural decline can take a writer to dark places. In last month’s issue, I reviewed David Thomson’s recent history of the movies, a kind of valedictory for his career as a critic — one far more distinguished than my own — in which he reads his own pessimism about the American present back into the motion-picture past and wonders whether the art had been corrupted and corrupting from the start.

I respect Thomson, but I reject this view. The waning of Hollywood’s creative spirit, the triumph of the blockbuster sequel over the epic and the romance and the comedy, is worth lamenting precisely because it represents a fall from the greatest heights of American popular art. The motion picture has been as essential to the American age as the novel was to the Victorians or the Homeric epic to the Greeks. And today, in what often feels like their autumn, movies still burst with colors that make other forms of pop culture look gray or wan by comparison.

Just in the past year, we’ve seen certain movies seize hold of the discourse in a way that no video game or YouTube short or podcast can ever hope to match.