Being an older Film geek

In my community, we have a local film society/group that watches older DVD's once a month. There isn't many of us, and from scanning the room, most of the people are 30 and under.
I'm 43 years old, and I consider myself to be a certified film geek. I was fortunate enough to live through 90's cinema, and I'm very appreciative of DTV movies. I love the Criterion Channel, and believe great storytelling can translate into any narrative form, whereas I think 1998's "The Celebration" is perfect example of pure storytelling using the most limited amount of tools.
I also once worked with a film crew on a documentary before, and it was interesting that some of the younger crew didn't know who John Barry was. Interesting because these people went to film school.
Anyways, last night we watched "Harvey", which I personally found good but not great. And when we had our Q&A afterwards, I wanted to bring up an idea that with a few changes, "Harvey" could have been a movie about a serial killer, in the vein of something like "Frailty", but I didn't say anything whereas firstly I don't think any of them saw "Frailty" and I didn't have the energy to explain myself on the Bill Paxton gem.
And also, there is never any real film criticism. I find that people in the film society as scared to say what they really think. So we get a lot of "snowflake" questions.
The last movie, we watched was "Badlands", which I'm also not really a fan of. I do appreciate the hard work and craft of that movie, but my criticism was that I felt like Richard Gere is in a different movie and not in a Terrence Malick movie. And nobody really confronted me about this.
With friends, we'll def. tear each other down and bring our honest opinions. But is it fair that I'd expect that from a group of like-minded people?
I love movies, but it seems like nobody is really talking about movies anymore. And if nobody is taking about movies anymore, how can we grow to tell new stories.