The New York Observer (observer.com) no longer has movie reviews except for movies that Rex Reed watches, which is down to one or two a month. They have categories for Art, Lifestyle, Culture, Business, Art Market, Art Reviews, Luxury Travel, Nightlife & Dining, Style, Theater, Opera, Dance, Tech, Finance, and Media. They are no longer observing movies.

     Maybe movies are a dead corpse, alongside TV.  In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minnow said,

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.    

     Things have only gone downhill from there.

     I don’t see movie reviews anywhere else, either, so it’s not just the Observer. Movie reviews vanished during the COVID lockdown because nobody could go to the movies so there weren’t any new films for a couple years. And after the movie theaters opened, the movies were no longer good. Comic book heroes and remakes and sequels outdoing each other in wokeness. 007 is now a black woman.

     I’m talking about movie reviews online. Text about movies. I’m sure there are hundreds of YouTube sites dedicated to movie reviews, but I’m a reader, not a viewer.