Turn that around a bit. Some films, irrespective of their effects stand the test of time- LOTR ( which is 20 years old now) original Star Wars, the Godfather, Terminator 2...the list goes on.
Good acting and direction , well written stories, well developed characters, clever storytelling and pacing.... these things make movies great and if they are part of a film's DNA it will "hold up".
Not every film becomes an old film in 10 years, some films are immortal.
But this is simply not true. You are looking at those movies strictly through your own experiences and biases. When I taught film school, I had 20 year olds(young, but not under-developed children) telling me movies like T2 and Back To The Future were cheesy and old fashion. My nieces and nephews have told me countless times that they need to remake the original Star Wars trilogy so that it isn’t “so dated”. Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever. The direction, characters and story are still very relevant today(we just had a Kane figure in the White House), yet it still feels old fashion because it is. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Movies(or really any art) are like fashion. Bell bottoms looked cool in the 70s. Now they don’t. Does that mean they were never really cool? No, it just means our tastes have changed. Films were made a certain way in Classic Hollywood. That style of filmmaking is no longer in vogue, so it feels “dated”, but the filmmaking didn’t magically stop working. The great films of that era are still great films. Modern audiences just aren’t interested in it.
Look at New Hollywood. New Hollywood was focused on gritty realism, which often lead to a much slower, realistic pace and much slower editing. Someone born during or after the MTV generation of cut cut cut, is probably going to find New Hollywood’s slow pace boring. In fact, some of these very people may find The Godfather boring.
One of the reasons certain films, such as the original Star Wars or Spielberg films feel like they have not dated is because they are still with current trends. Their fashion is still in style. Our current fashion of big IP tentpoles are designed after Spielberg and Lucas. But that won’t always be the case.
A film’s place in history can be interesting to see
it’s legacy from an influential standpoint, but even that is debatable( there are so many shots and callbacks to things like Citizen Kane that have been done so many times many people don’t even realize they are copping Citizen Kane). Ultimately, a film as its own self merit is best determined by the film itself and how, when and why it was made.
