ANDREW KLAVAN: Why Movies Suck — It’s the Spirit of the Age.

I found the Oscar winners from the eighties generally good, though not really great. But as we reached the nineties, something odd happened. I started to see films that were exceptionally well-made, some even delightful to watch, but which had at their core an essential element of dishonesty.

Dances with Wolves, which, like Pocahontas and Avatar, partakes of the Rousseauian fallacy that there is something innocent and benevolent about the lives of primitives. Schindler’s List, which presents itself as the authoritative movie about the Holocaust, and yet centers on acts of decency that were so rare an exception as to be nearly non-existent. The English Patient, a dishonorable and subtly antisemitic picture, in which the primary act of love involves giving traitorous aid to the Nazis because who wins the war doesn’t matter so much as getting the girl. (The opposite theme of Casablanca, a far, far better film.) And American Beauty, a picture that pretends to be about a straight man but isn’t, and hasn’t got a single honest frame in it from start to finish.

Let me repeat: these aren’t necessarily bad films. They’re certainly talented films. Most of them are watchable, even good. Schindler’s List would be a great film if you removed its overblown sense of itself, and its childish Spielbergian-Freudian theorizing about the Nazis’ motives. They are simply films with a cancer of dishonesty eating away at their hearts.

Read the whole thing. The 1990s was the decade in which Hollywood went nihilistic on WWII, and while Harvey Weinstein’s productions such as The English Patient and The Reader were the chief cause, even Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan wasn’t immune: What Happened To World War II Movies?