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Styles of Play: Cinematic Motivation
Cinematic motivation means that major characters, either player or non-player, have motivations which are not common in real life but are common in fiction. This commonly falls into two types, heroes and villains. A heroic character goes around doing heroic things because that's what heroes do: in a fantasy setting, rescuing maidens and slaying dragons is heroic, for instance. Villains, on the other hand, go around doing evil and villanous deeds because they can, not for any sane reason.

The opposite of cinematic motivation is realistic motivation, where characters act like real people, and do things for the kind of reasons that people have.

I am rather ambivalent about cinematic motivation. I like games which have it, and ones which don't. Games with some degree of heroism/villany, and larger than life charcaters doing great deed, and evil mad scientists trying to take over the world, can be great fun. On the other hand, when I write scenarios I try to make the NPCs real people who have good reasons for what they're doing. Of course, in real life people do do things for no good reason, so you can't go too far with this approach.

I do think it necessary that GMs should make clear before the game whether player characters are supposed to be heroes or not. There are players and GMs who always assume that PCs must be heroic, and get quite upset when they're not. I used to roleplay with a GM who said to me on a few occasions after games, in rather shocked tones, 'I didn't think your character was very heroic,' to which my response was 'Well he wasn't supposed to be.' After he'd done this a few times I came to realise that he always assumed that PCs should be heroes. I wish he'd said that to me before the games so I'd known.