Covering more than forty films made since 2001 - including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Paper will be Blue, Police, Adjective and Beyond the Hills - this pioneering collection of essays on New Romanian Cinema is the first to contextualise it aesthetically, theoretically and historically.

Films such as Occident, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Police, Adjective and If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle have brought Romanian cinema from relative obscurity into the limelight of the international festival circuit and to the attention of professional and lay audiences alike. These films' common aesthetic, thematic, ethical and ideological traits expound a coherent and increasingly important film movement - the new Romanian cinema. Through the prism of a representative selection of twenty extraordinarily well-crafted and highly awarded films made over the last decade, this book offers an overview of Romanian cinema from its origins to the present. It describes the cultural, social and political environment. It features historical and textual analysis of key films. It offers a unique exploration of the films' audio-visual grammar of space and time. It integrates contemporary film theory and cultural and gender studies. It examines the broader (Eastern European) industrial context and the impact of audience and industry discourses. It features interviews with prominent directors such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu.

Ludwig Wittgenstein loved movies, and based on his remarks on watching them, there is a strong connection between his experience of watching films and his thoughts on aesthetics. Furthermore, however, Wittgenstein himself has been invoked in recent cinema. Wittgenstein at the Movies is centered on in-depth explorations of two intriguing experimental films on Wittgenstein: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein and Peter Forgacs' Wittgenstein Tractatus. The featured essays look at cinematic interpretations of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy in a manner bound to provoke the lively interest of Wittgenstein scholars, film theorists, and students of film aesthetics. As well, the book engages a broader audience concerned with philosophical issues about film and Wittgenstein's cultural significance, with the world of fin-de-siecle Vienna, of Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century, of artistic modernism.