As modern film theory has struggled to keep pace with the developments of contemporary cinema, this book draws on actor-network theory and its material-semiotic mindset to allow a thorough understanding of the innovative character of cinema at the turn of the millennium. It is argued that the ongoing digitization has finally allowed cinema to return to a material-semiotic mode of perception; one side of this being the ‘spectacle’ of the blockbuster, while the other side might best be described as an edgy realism: the realism of ‘material-semiotic relationality’.