Why is lighting so much more softer in movies than it use to be?

It seems that way with a lot of recent movies compared to older ones. If you want film noir movies that are pre 60s, and even 60s movies, they go for hard lighting, where as a lot of movies of the last 30 years, especially now even more, are mostly about soft lighting.

Personally I thought the hard looked a lot better. You get all these crisp details in the faces, and the shadows, that you just don't get with soft. It was simply more cinematic, at least to me.

But even on shoots I have been on to help out, the directors want to get the lighting very soft, and no one seems to go for hard anymore. Any reason, why the majority of filmmakers of changed tastes?

I think when you make your own film, you should choose to have it hard, do you like it hard on the face or soft? again some people like it hard and some like it soft it depends how much you can take from the hardness before having to go soft.....

That is just the evolution of business of cinema. Why noone is using dissolves for transitions anymore?

HD played its role as well as introduction of led,kinoflos etc. less hassle,no heat as opposed to massive fresnels.
Also soft lighting was influence quite a lot by tv as they don't have time to change setups they just light soft/flat for 360 shoot.

Oh okay. Just curious as to why it all changed. Why would you have to change setups? Can't you just light the scene hard, but once, to save time in shooting?

In general, no you can't just light the scene once, no matter if you're using hard or soft lights.

It realistically depends on your budget and the look you want. If you have the budget and room to be able to hang a bunch of spacelights above everybody's head, and the look you want is an incredibly soft ambient light glow, and you'll never see the ceiling in your shots, then sure you can do that. But in general, you can't just set lights once and shoot everything in the whole scene.

That's exactly why the idea of 'shooting the wide' first and then getting closer in was developed - shoot and set lights for the wide because it's harder to get lights in close. Then, for the closer shots you can tweak to where you want and get them in much closer.

Think of matching OTS shots. You might be lit for one side, but swing around for the reverse and you'll find the lighting will generally be very different, and won't match aesthetically, even if technically that's what the lighting should be doing.

In film, you tend to cheat a little bit when it comes to lighting. Whilst in general, most lights have to be motivated to some degree, that's not true of everything, and audiences don't really pay that much attention to exactly where the light is coming from. You'll often find in movies that reverse shots are lit very similar to each other, even if it's impossible for the light to do that. A classic example is Lawrence of Arabia. In the desert scene, two characters stand opposite each other, facing one another. IIRC, in both actor's mid shots, the sun is behind them. That's physically impossible, unless somehow you have two suns (which on Earth, we obviously don't). In the cut, however, you don't even notice it and you completely buy it.

I struggled to notice it until it was specifically pointed out to me.

There's also alot more "natural light / low light" stuff being shot which ahs worked its way into the audiences acceptance, so filmmakers are exploiting that as a way to deliver a message of "real" or "natural looking" to their footage.

Yeah it seems that a lot of indie stuff is looking that way, and my collaborators are shooting their projects that way. I'm the opposite and want to shoot hard cinematic lighting.