Ruin Explorer
Legend
The quality of what gets made isn't really chosen by the writers.
It's chosen by the companies who produce the films and TV shows.
So blaming the writers, as you appear to be doing, is pretty bizarre. You could argue audiences are part of the problem, because a lot of kind of dubiously-written shows have been very successful (looking at you, Stranger Things), but ultimately what gets on air is up to the executives, not the writers. Quite often executives will choose okay-but-not great writing which audiences will lap up due to the subject matter over good writing. But some audiences want genuinely good writing, so that's also a market you can aim at - and some companies/execs do.
We've had a lot of extremely good writing over the last decade, too. Also if we compare average writing quality from 2013 to 2023 with writing quality from 2003 to 2013, which do you think will come out better? If you think 2003 to 2013, you need to remove those ultra-thick rose-tinted spectacles. The baseline quality of writing in TV shows now is significantly higher than it has been at at point in the past. Literally any.
Movies, as @payn says, are in a weird place. Extremely well-written movies don't put butts in seats the way "cinematic universes" (particularly the MCU) do. Also big-name stars are kind of making a come back in that movies which are primarily intended to be streamed tend to be star vehicles, or at least are heavily reliant on the casting of the leads. A mediocre movie with an appealing premise and Ryan Reynolds in it is going to get far more views than something brilliantly written but with a less-popular actor. But I think this gradually shifting a bit - the magic of "cinematic universes" of all kinds is wearing off - so we may see improvement here.
Certainly the WGA's demands here do not seem unreasonable, either.
Which The Times? Neither the NYT nor the UK The Times said that. The NYT review was broadly positive but said it wasn't Garland at the top of his game - the UK The Times (aka The Thunderer) did two reviews of it, one of which was basically trolling/pandering the right-wing readership they have - I assume that's what you read - but was very unserious as a review. Even that didn't say it was "90 minutes of man hating" though. The other The Times review was a bit more serious and less pandering, and had similar feelings to the NYT, but there's no way you could have got that from the latter one.
Either way, Men is an extremely well-made movie, and your assumption about it is flatly wrong. You should not be questioning its place other people's lists of best movies when you both haven't seen the movie and are relying entirely on your own creative interpretation of a single review from a particularly right-wing and pander-y* newpaper.
* = I should note that The Times was not always thus. In the 1990s and earlier, it was practically the definition of centrist or centre-centre-right, and even stayed that way for some of the Blair era. But sometime around 2008-2010 (I read it from when I was a kid until about 2012), it clearly discovered or was directed by Murdoch that pandering to the more bigoted/stupid/ignorant feelings of some of its readers was the way of the future, and it started making pandering to those its business, together with promoting increasingly extremist ideas and adopting an increasingly anti-science stance on pretty much everything, even outside of stuff marked as opinion. Disappointing because when I grew up it had quite a lot of journalistic integrity and it had a good attitude to science (better than, say, The Guardian of that era), which it has since entirely abandoned. I still have a couple of friends who work there (one a quite senior journo) and even they are disappointed with the overall direction.
