Realism and movies

There's a section in Horkheimer and Adorno's essay on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment which criticizes the loss of boundaries between products of entertainment and real life.  They appear to be annoyed by the fact that films (movies) have become extensions of the real world.  A viewer sees the world he moves in as a extension of the filmic world.  That movies (a collective hallucination) are able to double for reality is (in part) a function of technology.  However, I wonder if the tendency toward realist cinema (and realist novels) isn't a function more of the concerns and artistic choices of the director / writer.  Eric Rohmer, for example, made films that almost had a documentary feel to them.  The world he captured is the world that anyone of us could walk out the door and find ourselves in.