Reality Effects brings together the reflections of leading film scholars and critics from Latin America, the UK and the United States on the re-emergence of the real as a prime concern in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian film, and as a main reason for the acclaim both cinematographies have won among international audiences in recent years.

Argentine filmmaking from the mid-1990s to the present has enjoyed worldwide success. New Argentine Cinema explores this cinema in order to discover the elements that have made for this success, in relation to the country's profound political, social, and cultural crisis during the same period. Jens Andermann shows how the most recent wave of films differs markedly from the Argentine cinema of the preceding decade, following the end of the dictatorship in 1983. Studying films by Lisandro Alonso, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, Raul Perrone, Martin Rejtman, and Pablo Trapero, among...