Now the term is more amorphous, but there are still movies that people tend to place higher on the scale of artistic merit, and most movies made outside of Hollywood are automatically assumed to have more integrity, no matter how badly or well they're made. At the opposite end of the scale we have the giant catchall for the mainstream pictures. After that are the large number of mainstream movies that are not necessarily big and dumb but are simply made and marketed to appeal to a wide range of moviegoers. But we already know that. Brave modern moviegoing demands a smudging of the borders.
Critics are as guilty as anyone of having their pigeonholes.