His largest work was The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), written in collaboration with Thompson and Janet Staiger.

Film theorists who wrote their dissertations under his advisement include Edward Branigan, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga.

One scholar has commented that the cognitivist perspective is the central reason why neoformalism earns its prefix (neo) and is not "traditional" formalism.

[6] Much of Bordwell's work considers the film-goer's cognitive processes that take place when perceiving the film's nontextual, aesthetic forms.

Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly hermeneutic (interpretive) approaches, among which he counts Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of poststructuralism.