I want to affirm what Mike Frank wrote, and expand on Weddle's criticisms.  When I first studied films in the 70s, intrigued with the local cineclub series and developing my tastes during the most cinematically creative period in the second half of the 20th century, we talked about angst and guilt and being towards death, and class and politics, with existentialist-marxist- neo-liberal theoretical readings behind it. Film studies has narrowed its scope, it seems to me, to maximize control.  
     There is a language only the cognoscenti can understand, but that was true of Heideggereans in the 70s.  But the focus seems much more on the gender wars and individual neuroses, and less on authentic care and class-based social change (which, of course, Marxism always predicted would be the effect on artists and intellectuals of the ascent of capitalism). We do not publish any articles on Lacan, or ones that offer Lacanian readings of film, in Film and Philosophy.  Not because I don't think him important (though puny beside Freud), but because too many other organs publish that stuff, and it just isn't philosophy.  Besides, Freud was ten times the original philosopher (especially in some of the new translations that de-scientize him).
     The wasteland grows, and nihilism is more rampant in our films, and in our students, than ever before.  Somewhere along the line, the general search for meaning got lost along the way, and the gender wars and our personal neuroses have taken precendence for some time now. But let's face it: if the sexes ever do become roughly equal, and if we ever do manage to become less neurotic (and homophobic), these great attainments will still leave us with most of the philosophic work left to be done.  The politics of suspicion, 
     So, all of Weddle's twaddle aside (esp. the insinuation that how much one pays should have anything to do with what grade one gets,) maybe the problem is that film studies just isn't answering the deeper needs that prospective filmmakers have, the needs that drove Scorsese, and Friedkin, and Cimino, and the other Raging Bulls of my generation. I hope they read our forthcoming special issue on ethical and existential themes in cinema. 

Dan