A new swathe of films are rejecting realism and returning to a bolder, more liberated kind of filmmaking. Why did we ever want films to be real in the first place? In 1967, the renowned French film critic and theorist André Bazin famously heralded realism in cinema as the truest pursuit of the form, cautiously aware of the power of other modes like expressionism or dialectical montage to ‘cheat’, ‘trick’ or ‘deform’ the real.