Cinematic, as an adjective, sits on two close meanings and people slide between them. One is simply “to do with films”: cinematic history, a cinematic technique, the cinematic language of a director. The other, and the one you hear a lot in reviews and ads, means “like a film” — framed, lit, a little larger than ordinary life. A street at night, a fight, a mountain road can be called cinematic when it looks as if a camera ought to be there. That second use is often praise. Though actually, it can also mean “trying rather hard to look like a movie,” all slow walks and big skies. The word is at home in criticism, marketing, and film school; in the stiffest academic prose, writers may prefer film or of cinema. There is a looser noun in games: a cinematic (also cinematics) is a short film sequence inside a video game, the bit where you watch instead of play. Outside that world the noun is rare; the adjective is the sense almost everyone meets.