This essay examines the primacy of worldbuilding in the age of CGI, transmedia practices and "high concept" fiction by studying the principles that govern the creation of a multiverse in a wide range of film and TV productions. Emphasis is placed on Hollywood sci-fi movies and their on-screen representation of imaginary machines that mirror the film medium, following in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's writings and the cyberpunk culture. A typology of worlds is established, as well as a number of analytical tools for assessing the impact of the coexistence of two or more worlds on the narrative structure, the style (uses of color, editing practices), the generic affiliation (or hybridity), the seriality and the discourse produced by a given film (particularly in fictions linked to post-9/11 fantasies). Among the various titles examined, the reader is offered a detailed analysis of the Resident Evil film series, Total Recall and its remake, Dark City, the Matrix trilogy, Avatar, Source Code and other time-loop films, TRON and its sequel, Christopher Nolan's Tenet, and several TV shows – most notably HBO's Westworld, but also Sliders, Lost, Fringe and Counterpart.

For well over a century, going to the movies has been a favorite pastime for billions across the globe. But is film actually good for anything? This volume brings together thirty-six scholars, critics, and filmmakers in search of an answer. Their responses range from the most personal to the most theoretical—and, together, recast current debates about film ethics. Movie watching here emerges as a wellspring of value, able to sustain countless visions of "the good life." Films, these authors affirm, make us reflect, connect, adapt; they evoke wonder and beauty; they challenge and transform. In a word, its varieties of value make film invaluable.

In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon argues that 21st-century mainstream filmmaking is increasingly and troublingly dominated by "synthetic cinema." He details how movies over the last two decades have fundamentally abandoned traditional filmmaking values through the overwhelming use of computer generated imagery, digital touch ups for the actors, and extensive use of green screen technology that replace sets and location shooting. Combined with the shift to digital cinematography, as well as the rise of comic book and franchise cinema, the temptation to augment movies with lavish, computer generated spectacle has proven irresistible to both directors and audiences, to the point that, Dixon argues, 21st-century commercial cinema is so far removed from the real world that it has created a new era of flawless, fake movies.

Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu. The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer. What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema — as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair — is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus. The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult

Thanks to modern technology, we are now living in an age of multiplatform fictional worlds, as television, film, the Internet, graphic novels, toys, and more facilitate the creation of diverse yet compact imaginary universes, which are often recognizable as brands and exhibit well-defined identities. This volume, situated at the cutting edge of media theory, explores this phenomenon from both theoretical and practical perspectives, uncovering how the construction of these worlds influences our own determination of values and meaning in contemporary society.

Heralding the digital era of cinema as a return to its roots as a crossroads of other media and cultural practices, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion challenge the prognosis that cinema is dying, arguing that cinema has always been more an "evolving patchwork of federated cultural series" than a static form with a fixed identity. In a discussion ranging from early cinema, of which today's media landscape a century later is an eerie reflection, to opera films in local movie theatres to the "return of cinema's repressed" - animation, and now performance capture - The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems lays out a roadmap for negotiating the issues that will confront cinema in the years ahead as it increasingly mingles with other media. In the process the authors coin another neologism in their extensive repertoire, the "kinematic," or the shift from the medium cinema to a convergence of moving image media, one that will engender a major "turn" in study of the field. This expanded second edition includes a lengthy interview with the authors on the developments in their thinking since this volume was first published.

This edited collection of original essays situates itself at the cutting edge of media theory, exploring imaginary worlds as forms of knowledge and forms of life. By exploring the concept of worlds from theoretical and practical perspectives, this book puts forward a unique and original starting point for rethinking media theory, going beyond the notion of communication and understanding the role of worlds in interaction rituals as well as the building of values and meaning in contemporary society. In recent years, due to digital distribution and the integration of social networking and entertainment content, viewing strategies and narrative forms are undergoing important changes. Notably, we are faced with the rise of multi- platform conglomerates, in which film, television, Internet, graphic novels, toys, and virtual environments create heterogeneous yet compact universes, recognizable as brands and having a well-defined semiotic identity. Scholars are looking for new theoretical tools to understand the role of contemporary new media in these phenomena and the increasingly central place that viewers hold in exploring, mapping, interpreting and expanding story worlds. On the one hand, Internet networks are increasingly studied as the environment for the emergence of forms of consumption through fragments. As Henry Jenkins recently underlined, media become spreadable (Jenkins, Ford, Green 2013). On the other, the observation of production practices in the contemporary media sphere shows that, instead of being only fluid and ephemeral elements, media fragments sometimes converge in persistent and heterogeneous spaces built from multiple contributions and comparable to worlds. Media creators don't merely forge stories or characters. Instead, they build worlds: fictional worlds, character worlds, alternative worlds...