By Mark Lawson (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-02-05 07:30

The star system of criticism remains controversial for journalists and readers. But it has allowed the producers of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd to run spectacular ads in this week's press, consisting of line after line of five stars.

In recent weeks, similar high-five campaigns have been used for the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - and UK reviewers have not yet even given their verdicts on what is in my view the outstanding movie of recent times: Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

So we are faced with two possible explanations. Either there has been a terrible outbreak of inflation in critical praise, or we are living through a remarkable era of cinema.

The declaration of golden ages should not be undertaken without considerable thought, but that is partly because the phrase is associated with nostalgia: The gilded years of television, or of jazz, we are lectured by veterans, happened in their youth, and we have ruined them.

What's noteworthy about the current golden age of cinema - which, when the histories are written, will surely rank with the 1940s and the 1970s as one of the three key periods - is that everyone is around to see it.

The main reason for this renaissance is that all levels of cinema - from the people who put up the budget to the people who pay for tickets - have become less frightened of intelligence and complexity.

In its first decades, the people who made movies tended to come out of mainstream art forms such as vaudeville and Broadway. Now, a producer, director or actor is likely to have been schooled - and then film-schooled - to high levels, and can rely on a potential audience of similar sophistication.

Complex and unsettling fiction now attract directors and actors in the way once reserved for populist fiction such as Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

And yet, though the younger generations of directors and actors tend to carry a greater weight of education in both cinema and other matters, they are also, paradoxically, less snooty about which movies are worthwhile.

The questioning of distinctions between high and low art - a deliberate project in both broadcasting and education in recent decades - irritates some dedicated elitists, but has been of immense benefit to Hollywood. High creative talent is increasingly reluctant to wear badges.

It is this catholicity of ambition that gives current cinema its richness. Producers, casting directors, creative talent and prize panels have all moved away from the strict rules of suitability that once fenced people into genres.

A shift in economics has also helped. Although it would be a mistake to think that any movie producer is in the business just for art's sake, there is a group of studios - The Weinstein Company, Dreamworks, Fox Searchlight -which wish to make films that make sense or waves as well as those that make money.

The rise of the DVD market -opening up cinema to those who consider themselves too busy or too classy to sit in the dark with others - has also widened the range of markets and target audiences, creating a kind of off-Hollywood equivalent to off-Broadway.

Admittedly, this revolution of intelligence is not all-encompassing: Films are being released that are as stupid as movies have ever been. As with wealth, education and healthcare, the gap between different groups of people is getting ever wider. But our luck is that, in this area, good and bad cost the same to the consumer.

The Guardian

(China Daily 02/05/2008 page9)