As good as it gets.

Quality in film is a subjective matter. Cinema, for the most part, tends to be a product of its time, its topicality relevant to the moment and rarely universal. Most genre pictures fall distinctly into this category with comedies stale-dating faster than donuts and thrillers not far behind. It is a rarity to find a film that translates ahead in time and retains its relevance with future audiences. As a result, only the best that cinema has to offer tends to be remembered generation to generation. We tend to compare these standout films from the past with the entire cross section of present day output and overstate the qualities of earlier films as a result. Breakout mainstream movies suffer disproportionately unfair comparisons to earlier works because of intense marketing and awards campaigns designed to increase awareness with the audience.

Film is the assembly of a multitude of components - a script, a director, a cast, producers, technical production, costume and set designers and a host of other people create the work that ends up on the screen. The roles and tools each of these parties have to work with has changed immensely over the years as rudimentary techniques have been replaced with newer ones designed to improve the efficiencies and look of the final product. CGI replaced huge sets and arguably increased the realism and authenticity of many movies. Many films simply couldn't be made without the advent of computer enhancement and design. The best of these CGI reliant films allow modern filmmakers to seamlessly create spectacular set pieces that could only be imagined by earlier directors. Whether this has made cinema better or not lays in the eye of the audience.

The culmination of the grandness of modern CGI enhanced films is probably the LOTR trilogy, a series inconceivable without it. Peter Jackson managed to create believable versions of the Tolkien world in a way considered impossible a mere decade ago. This year's blockbusters The Dark Knight and Iron Man along with countless other films continue to build on the possibilities facilitated by the technical prowess of Hollywood's studios. Only hindsight will tell if these pictures hold up over the years and for future audiences.

At a more basic level, film making outside the mega-budgeted blockbusters has also changed. Screenplays have arguably become harder edged and more deeply steeped in realism. Audiences seem to crave the exploration of darker territory and many recent films have delivered the goods. This year's No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Gone Baby Gone and several others pushed Film Noir conventions in new and unusual directions. Others like The Fall, Paprika, Persepolis, Southland Tales, Micheal Clayton, The Lives of Others and many more offered up new takes on cinematic style and substance. All in all, while mainstream cinema may be in a rough patch in terms of general consistency, a good number of standout films still made their way into theatres.

The 1980's might be a good example of another time where popular culture was in a collective nosedive. While there is precious little to celebrate from this lost decade, a host of films from this period have stood the test of time. Films as diverse and revered as Repo Man, Paris Texas, The Terminator, Raging Bull, Blood Simple, Stranger Than Paradise, Children of a Lesser God, Aliens, Brazil, Platoon, Runaway Train, Akira and The Last Emperor all sprang from perhaps the worst period of 20th American pop culture. Twenty years down the road, we will be able to look back at this period of cinema with the benefit of hindsight and perhaps a different slate of films than we might expect will have aged exceptionally well. Who knows? All I can say for certain is Drop Kick will still be gay and likely hungover.