[...] And in China a canny, Party-negotiated mix of state funding and foreign partnerships has propped up an industry likewise defined by its blockbusters. The Wandering Earth (2019) — “China’s first full-scale interstellar spectacular,” The Hollywood Reporter gushed — is exemplary: a feverishly action-filled, staggeringly high-grossing, relentlessly dull climate change allegory in which the United Earth Government abandons Earth and leaves a lone Chinese rescue unit, armed with a combustible bottle of Russian vodka smuggled into outer space, to stave off the planet’s destruction.

Aesthetically, these national cinemas tend toward Hollywood-style garbage; politically, they tend toward nationalism. They challenge US cultural dominance by lapping up its forms and diversify commercial cinema by flying different flags in the backgrounds of the same CGI-generated explosions. But their rise has opened up an alternative possibility: that a 21st-century cinema might describe a path divergent from Hollywood if not in opposition to it.