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?
Well spotted honestly, others have noted it but this is very much a choice by directors. Sometimes it can also be because the directors and editing staff have also tested the video footage for a very specific setup like cinema for example. The game of thrones people infamously talked about how they had tested everything on an 8k setup with 5.1 surround sound ( Might have been an even fancier audio setup than that ) and pulled a Blizzard where they acted completely out of touch not understanding why so many people were complaining.
People regularly make fun of Breaking Bad because of how everything in the desert is ludicrously orange due to the colour grading. For a modern day contrast, if you don't watch anime you should find some good quality and compare, the colours overall are far more vibrant and show up much better on 1080p compared to these insistently grey and almost dark blue colours that the editors keep using.
It's funny because there does seem to be a bit of a trend with movie creators trying to gaslight their audience and pretend "Oh it's just because you're not watching it in the cinema". No your editing is shit and if it's a problem based on what screen it's being watched on then you should have done editing in post to make sure that it looks decent.
There's a whole other rabbit hole you can go down well and that's the audio. It's not just the fact that modern movies are often geared towards surround sound systems, I swear in a lot of cases the actors just mumble into the microphone a lot of the time. Again, contrast that with good quality anime and there are zero problems.
Hollywood has gone to shit in more ways than one, it's not just the fact that they're woke, they're just bad.