[cinephiles are] the ones who look down on others for having shallow understanding and enjoyment of things.

This claim can be made more general, for any aficionado of anything.

Humans don't need deep, elaborate fiction to thrive.

That's a strong claim, you might want to pause and rethink (revealing you might have some rather strange and possibly rigid opinions regarding matters of 'fact').

Some anthropologists believe language evolved precisely for fiction, so people could tell stories to one another.

The truth is that it's the person who believes that we lost something in the transition from serious films to spectacle who is the one with a shallow understanding of humanity... Humans can be just as multifaceted and clever without devoting their leisure time to stories with elaborate meanings and themes hidden inside.

That is another interesting and prima facie, seemingly very weird claim. It can be argued that all the greatest achievements of cultures; the arts and sciences are simply expressions of great wheeling metaphysical systems, of ever increasing sophistication and complexity, systems of fictions if you will. Perhaps ironically, the crudest, most superstitious and backwards cultures and societies might be judged to be shriveling in decline, based on the relative simplicity, paucity and shallowness of their own fictional systems, struggle mightily against their more elaborate and sophisticated neighbors, unable or unwilling to incorporate more modern ones into themselves. Maybe relying too much on augury, a god, a tradition, spirits or a book etc, instead of an eightfold way, a Russian chart or some mathematical cant can be the slow poison and death knell of a culture and way of life.

Fiction is not a large part of life.

More generally, being able to imagine, the faculty of fantasy, is perhaps the root of all language and thought, in a word; humanity. Without it there is no causality, no tomorrow, no yesterday, nothing counterfactual, no memory, no reason, no arts, no sciences. Maybe little or no emotional life whatsoever. We would probably be far worse off than many of the more intelligent animals without fiction. The degree that we have integrated communal fiction into our lives alone is perhaps the greatest gulf between us and all other livings creatures.

Maybe you'll appreciate this as an alternate interpretation.