The irony of working-class film flourishing at the end of history lends this new proletkino its distinct structure of feeling. Today’s working-class films have dwindled to the size of isolated protagonists, often women, trapped in small homes with families burdensome or disintegrating, their loneliness symbolized by “the shot of the solitary walker, alone in the crowd.” Politics, Bickerton points out, lies outside their scope, with protest “limited to individual acts of defiance, or criminality.” Happy endings are rare. Work is less a problem than its absence: unemployed, or soon to be, or loosely employed, characters wander through second-tier cities on the lookout for jobs, or sit in dimly lit rooms, sedated by drugs, the noise of the slums filtering through their windows. Panoramas of class war have narrowed to portraiture, claustrophobically drawn, relieved only by imprints of place: post-industrial landscapes and slums appear as backdrops, mere intimations of social context. Yet shining through in these films is a profound “moral charge,” Bickerton argues, one otherwise “entirely absent from today’s cinéma de qualité.” In them a world of experience typically neglected or sentimentalized instead finds expression.