The very titles of this year's big releases — Man of Steel, Wolverine, Elysium — seem designed not just to pull in the global comic book and sci-fi community (a huge army of real and superannuated teenage boys) but actively alienate the rest of humanity. And in the case of some of them, it's been working: The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, has been a disastrous flop, as has Will Smith's After Earth, with other titles such as Whitehouse Down and Pacific Rim seriously underperforming. For most of us, the mention of these movies brings forth a sense not of must-see but ennui. You just know that there's something seriously awry when it takes a studio more than $200 million to tell the familiar tale of a kids' Wild West hero and his trusty Indian sidekick. Not for nothing did Steven Spielberg warn earlier this summer that the studio system was in serious danger of breaking down.

I am piling on the agony here, but a quick detour around the more grown-up offerings has proved little better: Summer in February, a drama about the painter Alfred Munnings, suffered from a debilitating pointlessness (as well as a meaningless title). The relentlessly arty Only God Forgives, with Ryan Gosling, required not just the patience of Job but a strength of stomach which should not be required of anyone who's paid to see what they rightly assume to be, at one level or another, entertainment.  

A kind of cultural exhaustion has set in. Contemporary superhero blockbusters are successful, when they are, because the lack of nuance in dialogue — or lack of any meaningful dialogue at all — allows them to be easily translatable to Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic markets. So it's a hard-nosed commercial decision. But perhaps there's more to it than that. Years of equating the merits of Superman and Stendhal may have taken their cultural toll. The seriousness with which such movies are taken by the cultural relativists who set our critical parameters means that audiences find themselves giving considered attention to something which bears little analysis. Most adult minds, when watching this stuff, finally rebel with an inward cry of "but it's just a comic strip!" But turning to the media coverage, we find that such instinctive judgments mark us out as antediluvian. The laughably po-faced broadsheet examinations of the themes in Christopher Nolan's 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight, for example, showed not how knowing and sophisticated we were, but how craven and infantilised we'd become.    

The autumn will bring us a string of releases which will have enough merit to be considered for next February's Oscar nominations, and jaded palates will be revived. I'm counting on it for the sake of my relationship. As for the state of things now — well, it needn't be this way. It's not inevitable that cinema should, as is so often claimed, become gradually more irrelevant, that exhaustion must be terminal. Always question the received wisdom: back in the 1980s, a group of City analysts looked at the rock-bottom movie attendances and the massive growth in home video and concluded that the game was finally up for the beleaguered cinema. What they didn't count on was home video actually stimulating interest in the medium and henceforth causing an unprecedented rise in people buying tickets to see what I stubbornly refer to as the real thing. There remains tremendous goodwill towards the cinema, and the audience, of all ages, is still there. The ball is in the film-makers' court. As Kevin Costner nearly said in Field of Dreams: if you make them, they will come.