I have much respect for you, your writing skill, and your opinions. In this case, I completely disagree with you.

Whilst I agree cinema is art, I do believe that "art" is in the eye of the beholder. It is possible for you to look at a particular film and see nothing of value, and for someone else to see something of profound value. This is even true for something as wretched as Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. I may hate it, but I have to accept that someone else may find truth in it somewhere. All cinema is art, even if I consider it cynical, commercially driven art with a rotten soul.

I dearly love Martin Scorsese, but I disagree with what he said about Marvel films. The very best of those films (for instance, Captain America: Civil War) are capable of providing great inspiration, as well as moral and spiritual food for thought, for those who are captivated by them (such as yours truly, and in particular my eldest son). I take great issue with the idea that a film like Captain America: Civil War is not "cinema" or not "art". It absolutely is the former, since is a work made for cinema seen in cinemas (so on a purely pedantic level, that argument doesn't work). And I would also argue it is "art" for the reasons I've just given.

When I was younger, there was much snobbery around the films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Snooty critics would dismiss them as not having anything to say, but being purely the kind of "amusement park films" to which you refer here. Wrongly, in my view. Just because they were commercial, hugely popular, and contained groundbreaking visual effects does not mean they should be disqualified as art. I cannot even begin to tell you how profoundly these films spoke to me as a child, and of how much value (and indeed comfort) they provided. To this day, I see beautiful artistic and spiritual truths in all of them (love and pain are inseparable in E.T. for instance, or the painful, poignant character arc of Luke Skywalker in his struggle against the darkness in himself, in the original Star Wars trilogy).

Entertainment is not a dirty word. The deepest, most profound, most thought-provoking, or most important ideas are much more palatable when presented entertainingly. The very best of big mainstream entertainment films emphatically prove this point.