Part of what made this victory of perpetual blockbuster reanimation possible was the abandonment by most baby boomers of the film-critical cultural sphere, a flight that culminated in the publication of Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema” in the New York Times. Sontag claimed that both cinephilia and cinema were dead, an argument that now resembles the early 1990s “end of history” posited by Francis Fukuyama. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, as internet cinephilia began to rise, world cinema gave us, to name only a dozen, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, The Werckmeister Harmonies, In Vanda’s Room, Trouble Every Day, Khrustalyov, My Car!, Platform, The Piano Teacher, Kandahar, The Circle, Batang West Side, and Millennium Mambo. A serious, vital cinema of great originality, emotional depth, and beauty — the kind beloved by Sontag — was not in decline at all.