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I like Critical Drinker too. I also enjoy Andrew Klavan’s rants. And I pay attention to reviews and festival selections. Tastes vary, but if a major festival has a hundred films, give or take, and I find six or seven of enough interest to watch and one or two that hit my sweet spot and go on my favorites list, I regard that as a decent hit rate. It’s worth taking ten minutes to at least scan the list of selections looking for interesting subjects and directors or actors that I usually find reliable.

I agree about the writing. Good writing is hard. Good writers have always been in short supply. The streamers are selling subscriptions, not movies, and they have an insatiable demand for new content. There simply aren’t enough good writers to go around.

And then came the DEI mandates. I keep coming across remarks, always anonymous, that the writers rooms are the hardest places to integrate, and that too many mediocre writers have become entitlement tyrants due to race and gender privilege. So much of the writing is awful. It is bloated, lacks wit and polish, and feels like it was written by committee. It’s painful. I don’t know if this explains Amazon’s problems with The Rings of Power — direction and casting are painful as well — but the writing is so lifeless that it has “written by committee” stamped all over it.

Increasingly I find the most interesting movies are smaller films, many of them indies. It’s hard for the DEI commissars to mess with a writers room of one, especially when the writer is also the director. At least these aren’t written by committee.