If you calculate that the glory days of the ‘70s actually began with Bonnie and Clyde (fall of ‘67) and ended with Star Wars (May ‘77), it followed that the fallow, high-concept period of the early to mid ‘80s which included the tits & zits films (and which produced one unchallengeable classic — Risky Business) and the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula films (Flashdance, Top Gun), you can understand and sympathize with the July ‘86 cover-story freak-out by New York critic David Denby.

The indie-driven ‘90s provided what felt like an exciting reprieve, and there were certainly many distinguished films that came out in the early aughts before the superhero death virus that began to permeate in the early 2010s. This led to Denby’s “Do Movies Have A Future?”, which was published in 2012. But it wasn’t quite as bad as all that…okay, maybe it was.

The later Obama years nonetheless allowed for cinematic highlights (The Wolf of Wall Street, A Separation, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, Call Me By Your Name, Moneyball, Son of Saul), but then the scolding, pearl-clutching wokesters muscled their way into the remaining nooks and crannies of Hollywood consciousness in 2017-18, and a huge wave of fear, intimidation and conservatism flooded in, and right now many of us are still gasping for breath.