Post-Classic Cinema: Collected Film Reviews 2005 - 2013

Are cinema's best days behind it? That's what John David Ebert argues in his new book, a collection of film reviews and essays spanning eight years, in which he articulates the concept of post-classic cinema. A "post-classic" art style is a phase in which the repetition of a fixed stock of forms, cloned and serialized endlessly, gains the field of the medium in question. Film, as it neared the end of the last millenium, became simultaneously depleted of fresh content as well as technologically overburdened. And now, with the switch from celluloid to digital, it has been dealt the coup de grace. An entire age -- of drive-in theaters, midnight movies and double features -- is disappearing, and the future of the movie theater itself, with attendance at record lows, has now come into question. Film, it is evident, is no longer the "youngest medium."