This is the same thing that happened with book publishing and reading a couple decades ago... an explosion, avalanche of releases, into a rapidly disappearing audience. The few people left holding a storybook in their hands are overwhelmed and often rather isolated in their new pleasures. Authors find they only have a couple weeks to prove to their publishers that they were "worth" anything, and of course that's better than an opening weekend, but it amounts to the same thing. Niches and narrowing of genre have been the coping mechanisms in the frightspace, but that precious time to breathe that you and Stephanie talk about has been vacuumed out.

I imagine people in the music making world have similiar stories!
What's it all coming to????

Oh, I don't know about this lament. There's no reason in the world why a film critic can't just ignore seven of those nine major releases each week, why a newspaper film section should feel compelled to review every film that's released. It's not time that's in short supply, it's time on our schedules. And that's no one's fault but our own.

The current model for journalistic film criticism is outdated, certainly. The idea that every major release in a geographical area should have a review in the local paper is leftover from a time when there was a more manageable quantity of new major releases (so far as I can tell). But let's change the model, then, not bemoan the bounty of films we have in our hands to savor and compare notes about with our friends!