I'm watching Dante's Peak (1997), a volcano flick starring Pierce Brosnan.
The colours are just so wonderful -- it's like being outside in real nature.
Whereas with modern movies things seem really washed out. The filming is crisp, and the composition is usually good, but it feels like you're living in a claustrophobic world. Modern movies feel a lot like living in 1984.
Is this the difference between film/digital? Or are people choosing different colour palates?
Color grading and lighting is used to set the "mood" of a scene, and there are all sorts of psychological tricks that they will use to make it effective.
I haven't seen that movie in decades, and I'm far from an expert on film making, but I would guess that the color grading they used fell out of style due to Hollywood's more recent tendency to stick with the copy/paste approach of using what "works" until they beat it to death.
Everything looks orange in south America!