About

This essay is about Hollywood, art, AI, and how we humans perceive, value, and ultimately spend our time. Before I deep dive, know that I consider Pluribus a scam, and let me explain what I mean: Pluribus made heatwaves as a very successful, eagerly awaited series. And yet, it is purely popcorn content. There is no witty dialogue, no human relations considerations, no drama, no visual artistry, no story, no sentiment, no philosophy, and very little, boring action. It is basically an idea that is indeed interesting for the first episode and then a repeat, episode after episode, of the same recycled idea with different scenes. We have seen so much better versions of the same that Pluribus feels like someone prompted AI for some scenes that are stitched together to form a few episodes and call it a series. Any creative team would come up with wild ideas if the brief is: “A woman is the only human on Earth with aliens around her.” Pluribuscould have been so much better if the writing team wouldn’t offer simply cheap thrills but rather a real cinema-like experience.

Now to my main subject: In the last days, I was impressed by two films I watched, both with exceptionally high Metascores.

One of them even had a Metascore of 100, which simply means it is impeccable and perfect in every respect. That film was Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. The other is Athina Tsangari’s Harvest. On the surface, they could hardly be more different: one is a fast-paced, dialogue-driven New York film noir from 1957; the other a quiet, image-based, perfect example of the Greek weird wave genre. And yet I want to compare them, precisely because they embody two extremes of what cinema can be, one full of words, the other full of images.

Mackendrick, directing Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis at the height of their career, creates a world where language itself is a weapon. The script is relentless, every line sharpened, every pause filled with menace. It is a film of motion through dialogue, where what is said matters more than what is seen. The Greek-born Tsangari goes the other way and strips words away. Harvest breathes in its landscapes, its rhythms, the subtle choreography of people. Basically, every frame is a painting. She trusts the image in a way Mackendrick trusts the word.

Fact: Hollywood today could not make either Sweet Smell of Success or Harvest. The system no longer tolerates what those films demand from viewers: attention, patience, and a willingness to be unsettled. Audiences, and I include myself here as well to a large extent, have been conditioned in the era of social media to limit our attention span to fragments of a few minutes. To dedicate ninety or more minutes to a single work of cinema can now feel demanding, even difficult. We don’t tolerate a slow build; a film that doesn’t grab us in its first act often loses us entirely. The luxury of waiting for meaning to emerge, something both Mackendrick and Tsangari ask of us, is vanishing rapidly. I remember a joke that was going around art-house crowds, which pretty much sums up this topic well: “You know you are watching an Angelopoulos film when an hour and ten minutes into the film you look at your watch and realise that only 20 minutes passed.”

Of course, Hollywood’s decline cannot be reduced only to attention spans. The economics have shifted: films are no longer films but “content,” assets in an industrial pipeline, tested and trimmed before they are released. There was a time when directors could risk failure on a grand scale: Coppola with Apocalypse Now, or even Spielberg with the great ambition of his film A.I. Today, such risks are almost unthinkable within the studio system. What remains is either franchise comfort food like Marvels, Captain Americas, Mission Impossibles, etc., or prestige projects carefully calculated for awards season from studios like A24.

And this is exactly where AI hovers on the horizon. In the hands of studios, it promises to accelerate the decline: more content, faster, shaped by algorithms that feed us what we already know we like. But in the hands of independent filmmakers, it might paradoxically offer liberation. Just as lightweight cameras and cheaper film stock gave birth to the Nouvelle Vague, AI tools could allow new voices to work outside Hollywood’s machinery, creating films not bound by scale or formula. A good prompter with an artistic knack will be able to create visual beauty dressed in mesmerising sound over smart dialogue. It was digital over film; now we could well be on the path of AI over digital. And our generation has seen it all.

Going back to my comparative review, what struck me watching Sweet Smell of Success and Harvest is the important reminder that cinema itself is far from exhausted. Hollywood may be, but cinema still breathes in Angelopoulos’s long takes, in Kubrick’s precise compositions, in Spielberg’s rare ability to smuggle human vulnerability into spectacle, and in Tsangari’s silences. The form still has teeth. What it requires, as ever, is nerve: the willingness to risk alienating an audience in order to awaken them. And a lot of new talent that will emerge out of art school rather than software school.

Because if Hollywood can no longer find that courage, others will. And perhaps AI, in a strange twist of fate, will reinforce this: the belief in cinema as art, not content.