Realism is the new experimentalism....
Digital video may have created a monster (or a few hundred, plus the whole gamut of robots, dinosaurs, hobbits and super-heroes) but it's given new aesthetic life to the "redemption of physical reality" theorised by Andre Bazin and others.
CTheory offers an interesting perspective from Nicholas Rombes...

An earlier but still interesting piece on Bazin as part of Sight and Sound's "Innovators" series appears here...