In my brief tenure as critic here, I’ve been pretty clearly pessimistic about the current state of the cinema. Discerning readers will note that the only film I’ve reviewed positively so far was released 50 years ago. They’ll note, too, that I’ve been entirely ambivalent about the overall quality of this past year’s cinematic output. I took the chance in my Superman review to air my exhaustion with the whole superhero genre (a sentiment that at least seems somewhat shared by the general moviegoing public — for now).

It gives me little pleasure to report that Train Dreams is an unfortunately empty film. A pretty film, in some ways. But an empty one. And as a moviegoer who believes that today’s critics are, on the whole, far too easy on this contemporary strain of middlebrow cinema, I must confess: I’m tired of films that look and feel like Train Dreams. I know nothing about the original Denis Johnson novel, which some people I know have called a great one — I only have the film.

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story.

Seth Rogen is dreaming of New Hollywood. Just a few weeks ago, Apple’s The Studio won 13 Emmys — setting the record for most wins for a comedy series. The cynical read on this would be that there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than another backstage satire about itself; such an avalanche of golden trophies is as much a marker of the movie business’ self-love as it is for any qualities of the show, which are plenty. Certainly, The Studio is no Sunset Boulevard — no pitch-black excoriation of the underbelly of the world’s glitziest exploitation land, nor some more highly wrought tragic riff on a dying medium.

It’s a gift for the young cineaste to be introduced to certain filmmakers at certain stages of life. The films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, for instance, are a perfect education for the very young. They teach a fundamental fact. Movies are composed of conventions — frames, movements, transitions, plots, character types, stock situations — and it’s the responsibility of a great filmmaker to idiosyncratically adapt, or else explode, those conventions whenever possible.

Superhero films are strange things. For all that we’ve been inundated with in that bloating genre ever since Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie kicked off the contemporary rush, it’s easy to forget just how unlike everything else these kinds of films are. They’re sort of like other blockbusters, sure — only of course we all know they’re not. Each new superhero flick, in these days of superhero exhaustion, serves as an opportunity to step back, and consider just how strange it is that the last 25 years of American culture have seen us drowning in fantasies of wearing tights, capes, and technosuits while beating the ever-living hell out of each other.