@Owen Glyndwr you're needed.
Here I am!
There aren't any good movies filmed before the '90s, change my mind.
Oh, I understand there are important and influential and game-changing films, but they're all freaking crap by today's standards.
Notable exceptions:
-12 Angry Men
-To Kill A Mockingbird
-Monty Python
-Blade Runner
-Smokey and the Bandit
-Parent Trap
-Lots of Disney animations, but that's almost a separate category
I mean, you literally just changed your own mind here.
But more to the point, I think you're embodying some wrong-headed thinking here which frames film as a technology which interminably and unyieldingly lurches towards incremental advance; which views film as a portfolio of predilections and techniques which a director must tick off to achieve a fresh tomato rating, rather than, y'know an expression of an artistic medium aiming to use tools at hand to express thoughts and ideas and tell stories. Obviously I think this is wrong, for the simple reason that, while, sure, technology and techniques may have advanced - snappy editing and sound mixing are certainly easier today than in the times when cuts were literally that - but it's rather silly to declare that Murnau is inferior to Bay because Bay has "more better cuts," for the same reason to declare that Shakespeare or Virgil or Austen are inferior to Rowling and Brown and Meyer because they use "more better words," or that Giotto or Monet are inferior to Rothko and Warhol because they used "more better paints and brushstrokes." To take a more charitable implementation of your argument, are Mozart and Bach by-definition inferior to Stravinsky or the Beatles or Bowie because they wrote their music prior to the invention of the Saxophone or the re-discovery of exotic scales or the development of poly-rhythms? Is the music of Billie Holliday or Gerschwinn or Ellington or Charlie Parker rendered the less beautiful, profound, or complex because they predate the development of modal jazz by Miles Davis, free jazz by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and Fusion jazz by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock? No, these are patently absurd notions. Even if you take away a singularly temporal/progressional/technological argument, and substitute, say a "well modern [art medium] is by definition superior because it's more relateable, and is better able to speak to modern tastes vis-à-vis historical milieu, tempo/pacing, or style," you still run into the same problem, which is, to crib Derrida, that great works of art precisely because they can't be limited to just one interpretation, to just one cultural mode of existence, but because they are open to manifold interpretations, and thereby are able to capture the imaginations of millions across time and space. In terms of structure, Pride and Prejudice basically wrote the formula for the modern romance, but even still, even if I and millions of readers around the globe, aren't utterly enmeshed in the particulars of the early 19th century English aristocratic milieu, it's still a deeply entrancing work on its own merits, and one I would absolutely prefer to the vast majority of modern productions of literary romance.
Another way to examine this would be to look at philosophy, which would much more closely adhere to this progressional framework: Aristotle draws from Plato, Augustine draws from both, Ockham and Aquinas draw from all three and so on. Surely such a system, theoretically committed to accruing true knowledge and answering the big questions about the human condition, would accelerate towards a singularity. And yet that is, and has never been, the case. The truly great philosophical minds are still relevant to this day, and relevant
in ipso - for their own sake. If you want to get into philosophy, the answer isn't: "Oh just read Zizek or Baudrillard or Derrida because they represent some developmental
telos which perfectly synthesizes the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Lacan." Rather, the practice of studying philosophy is to read the works of these thinkers on their own terms, and subsequently to put their thinkings in dialogue with one another.
Which is all mostly just to say that I don't like the way you've framed your assertion. Art is by definition subjective; it's subject to individual taste, and a taste which even within the individual is ephemeral. You like what you like. Cool. You do you. I won't object. But I can and will object to the transformation of this expression of personal taste into a grand unified theory of art and art interpretation, and thereby the willful shutting yourself off from a massive treasure trove of incredibly profound, incredibly moving, and, most especially, of incredibly
diverse artistic productions.
It seems to me like the reason you're making the declaration you have, is simply because you haven't seen a whole lot of movies outside of that 90s-and-beyond wheelhouse. Your exempla (even the exceptions) are extremely America- (and institutional Hollywood-) centric. So to leave off here, I'll list out some prominent directors from my personal favorite decade, all of whom absolutely exceed the best of 90s-present cinema in my eyes.
20s Cinema
America
Buster Keaton
Harold Lloyd
Charlie Chaplin
Ernst Lübitsch
Erich von Stroheim
King Vidor
Robert Flaherty
Lois Weber
Oscar Micheaux
Sweden/Denmark
Victor Sjöström
Mauritz Stiller
Carl Theodore Dreyer
Russia
Boris Barnet
Yevgeni Bauer
Yakov Protazanov
Dziga Vertov
Lev Kuleshov
Sergei Eisenstein
Vsevolod I. Pudovkin
Alexander Dovzhenko
India
Homi Master
Baburao Painter
Germany
Fritz Lang
Max Ophüls
Robert Wiene
F.W. Murnau
Spain
Florián Rey
Salvador Dalí
Luís Buñuel
France
Germain Dulac
Abel Gance
Jean Epstein
Marcel L'Herbier
Francis Picabia
René Clair
Japan
Teinosuke Kinugasa
Brazil
Alberto Cavalcanti
