As many literal-minded people pointed out, 2019 was not in fact the last year of movies. Many good films have been made since then. Last year great films from all over the world were released in the US. A random list of disparate and original films seen on American screens in 2024 includes La Chimera, About Dry Grasses, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, The Settlers, A Different Man, Universal Language, and, yes, Megalopolis. One of the best movies of the year summed it all up, not just in its title but in subject matter and style—in its whole approach to what a movie is and can be in the mid-2020s: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. It’s a film about a certain kind of filmmaking being done under certain conditions that seem, in their way, more perilous than the ones under which Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was made.

I think 2019 will come to be seen in film history as a golden year and an inflection point, the same the way 1939 and its movies exist in the popular imagination as a series of classics constantly open to new investigation and debate—not just The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but also The Rules of the Game (of course), Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Love Affair, Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln, and at least a couple dozen others. The 2019 version of this inventory includes Parasite, The Irishman, Uncut Gems, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Souvenir, Ash Is Purest White, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and as in 1939, a number of other films whose reputations will grow and wane and grow again—Peterloo, Atlantics, La Flor, Midsommar. The films of 1939 arrived at a time of burgeoning right-wing authoritarianism, and 2019 was similarly set on a precipice.

The difference between 2019 and now is that films from six years ago already seem the product of a different world. As it says onscreen in a film made at another turning point in history, “That era has passed. Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore.”

In Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” which is about an automated torture device, Kafka writes that “we used to have to adjust a few things by hand, but from now on the machine will work all by itself.” I think this is exactly what people dread about AI and why they recoil from it, and also why large corporations are so excited about it. It is an aspect of the kind of fascism Kafka predicted. It removes the human element from the cinema just as the tech industry in general is removing showbiz from entertainment.

Here the news, entertainment, and the government all merge into a pool of toxic sludge. Because of AI, we could already picture a future in which another pandemic happens while we, as a species on lockdown, pass the hours in isolation viewing subpar art made by hallucination-prone nonentities. Today, videos of ICE raids scored to AI-generated nü-metal songs follow AI-generated jpegs of Donald Trump as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, calling to mind “Ride of the Valkyries” from that film’s score, solidifying the connection to the Wagner-loving Third Reich. We live under a mode of dehumanized production where the most human element is the images of dead Palestinians that show up in our feeds between the latest iterations of the official slop.

The confluence of digital projection, streaming channels, AI, and the alleged death of criticism often makes it seem like we are dealing with the destruction of a worldview. I believe that this is indeed the goal of the corporations that control the studios and publishers. I don’t think it means that people don’t want to read criticism. What they don’t want to read are writers who are afraid of their editors, who curry favor with Hollywood, and who want to be influencers. Critics like that don’t consider one of the most important and necessary things about criticism today, that “struggle,” as Noam Chomsky put it, is always a matter of fighting “the business world.”

That should be foundational. The novelist Don DeLillo said the same thing in 2005, in an interview with a French horror-film magazine:

Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments…. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.