Though frequently bemoaned for allegedly having threatened the survival of the traditional screen media of film and television, the so-called digital revolution has, in fact, fostered rich new economies of production and perception. Of primary interest is the way in which these recent screen artists exploit the possibilities of digital media while relying on an indie-style film aesthetic and ethic, particularly those who do so in order to ponder the emotional intricacies and material realities of contemporary American sexual mores and romantic lives. What New York Times critic A.O. Scott calls a “neo-neo-realist” mode of locally produced, microbudgeted everyday stories striving for truthful, socially conscious authenticity—the converse to hundred-milliondollar-plus, CGI-outsourced, merchandizing-friendly fantasy franchises—constitutes digital technology’s other momentous offering to twenty-first-century screen culture, and not merely by allowing affordability and accessibility to far greater numbers of creative media-makers (“Neo-Neo Realism,” n. pag.). In coining the term “neo neo-realism,” Scott was also singling out what he perceived to be the promising re-emergence of films using “lived-in locations and non-professional actors and their explorations of work, neighborhood and family life, all hallmarks of the neo-realist impulse,” helped along by millennial developments in independent production, marketing, and distribution tactics (“A.O. Scott Responds,” n. pag.). In recent years, what I would call “moderate minimalism” has been resuscitated cinematically, which is no coincidence, but rather one manifestation in wider cultural movements for environmental sustainability and compassionate capitalism movements, pitted against excess waste, outsourced manufacturing, and deficit financing. Sizing up American society in the decade following 9/11, Scott observes that “magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle,” and suggests that neo-realism’s “engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy” (“Neo-Neo Realism,” n. pag.). Tracing the neo-realist impulse’s global movement since its origins in post-World War II Italy, Scott ventures that neo-realism “might be thought of less as a style or genre than as an ethic” (“Neo-Neo Realism,” n. pag.). With Hollywood spinning $100+ million yarns of escapist denial or (occasionally) self-aggrandizing heroism, and Must-See TV continuing to dish out formulaic sitcoms and legal procedurals while premium cable indulges in mere titillation more than genuine transgression, refusing to swallow these wish-fulfilment fantasies and escapist extravaganzas becomes an ethical imperative.