Fully agree about the attention span stuff. I kind of think TV drove it initially, especially animation.

After a season or two The Simpsons started to pick up pace, and for its time it was kind of frenetic. South Park picked up that ball and ran with it. Then when Family Guy came along I thought this is nuts, and I wondered if there wasn't an active effort to erode attention spans on a large scale.

There are plenty of other examples outside animation, but I picked those because they're still well known.

I consider myself fortunate to have seen the progression first hand. And to have had an older boss way back who had an infectious love for well made art, particularly in films.

This video makes some great points about how movies don't feel real anymore. Digital color grading is part of it, but the very short version is that movies don't give us the sensory information or speak to us in the visual language that we need to feel like the movie is real. Watching the video gave me a whole vocabulary for how to critique failings in modern movies.

It at least seems like "the classics" were attentive to the craft. When good direction, lighting, angles, music come together I’m enthralled.

I found Sinners to be nice and slow moving for most of it, plus Pluribus the TV show is slow and but l both are cinematic. They are fewer but not gone.