The Snickets stuff is impressive. Arguably, you can achieve a high degree of realism for short sequences. I'm thinking more in terms of a sustained performance with the normal range of camera setups and scenes you'd find in a "regular" film, if that makes any sense. In artificial intelligence, they have the so called Turing Test: A person is connected to both another person and a computer via a terminal. The person tries to distinguish which is which soley by asking questions. If the computer can answer arbitraily posed questions without giving away its non-human nature, it is deemed to be "intelligent." Perhaps we can formulate a Turing Test for CGI.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken