Film after film : or, what became of 21st-century cinema? / Hoberman, James Lewis

Includes bibliographical references and index.

A post-photographic cinema. The myth of "the myth of total cinema" -- The matrix: "a prison for your mind" -- The new realness -- Quid est veritas: the reality of unspeakable suffering -- Social network -- Postscript: total cinema redux -- A chronicle of the Bush years. 2001: after September 11 -- 2002: the war on terror begins -- 2003: invading Iraq -- 2004: Bush's victory -- 2005: looking for the Muslim world -- 2006: September 11, the anniversary -- 2007: what was Iraq and where? -- 2008: the election -- Notes toward a syllabus. In praise of love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) -- Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001) -- Avant-garde goes digital: Corpus callosum, Cotton Candy, and Razzle Dazzle -- Russian ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002) -- Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) -- Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2002) -- Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) -- The world (Jia Zhangke, 2004) -- Battle in heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005) -- The death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) -- Day night day night (Julia Loktev, 2006) -- Southland tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) -- Inland empire (David Lynch, 2006) -- Between darkness and light (after William Blake) (Douglas Gordon, 1997/2006) -- LOL (Joe Swanberg, 2006) -- Flight of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) -- Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) -- Opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics (August 8, 2008) -- Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010) -- The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010) -- Once upon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011).

One of the world's most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital'and post-9/11'age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like AndrE Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema's most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.