Even with Kate Winslet and Judy Davis cast in The Dressmaker, the film was considered too high a risk for international buyers.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
If the Australian screen industry is to grow into the future and prosper, it cannot ignore the untapped creative talent and leadership potential of women. We need strategies to address this problem.
The great detective’s purchase on popular culture was not always so assured.
Benedict Cumberbactch and Martin Freeman in Sherlock, courtesy of Channel Nine
As Benedict Cumberbatch prepares to return to 221B Baker Street for a Sherlock Christmas Special, a great, unsolved mystery remains: what is the source of the detective’s enduring appeal?
The Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen represents the strength of living the Beatitudes against injustice.
Murray Close/Lionsgate
The Hunger Games movie franchise has ended. What can we learn from Katniss Everdeen about living a just life? This article contains spoilers for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II.
This year’s Tropfest has run into trouble – what does that mean for Australian filmmakers?
Michael Clarke
The future of the worlds largest short film festival hangs in the balance. Can Tropfest survive? And, if not, what’s the loss to Australia’s film industry?
In the absence of content quotas, the broadcaster’s children’s offerings seem vulnerable to cuts.
ABC
We know the ABC is facing tough times, given the decision last year to cut its budget by A$254 million over five years. But how hard are those cuts falling on locally-produced children’s TV?
Violence. Yes. Glamour. Yes. But the most engaging element of Spectre may be its tone.
Jonathan Olley/SPECTRE
Spectre is a return to form for the series, and the best of the Daniel Craig films, tying together the legend with a narrative that incorporates and develops the past 50-plus years of Bond.
The life Adams was leading 100 years ago was far from a Hollywood fantasy.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.
This Remembrance Day, spend some time with Claire Adams Mackinnon – the silent Hollywood movie star who stole the heart of Melbourne bachelor and lived the last 40 years of her life in Victoria.
Love complicates the complex marriage deals arranged by parents on the island of Tanna, though rarely with such profound ramifications as those depicted in the film.
Contact Films
“What is the point of studying popular films?” As barbaric as it may appear, this is a good question. It forces one to reconsider, and to some extent thereby refresh, one’s perspective on the subje
Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, Disney Studios Vice President Mary Ann Hughes and Screen Queensland CEO Tracey Vieira pose at Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast last week.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School e Abi Tabone, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
For every film, specialists are employed for everything from rigging the lights executing the stunts. The announcement of two major new productions coming to Australia will develop that expertise.
The real force of Star Wars is to be found in its music, an aural cocktail of orchestral pieces punctuated with lightsabers, hyperspace leaps, and a hint of droid.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
For all the speculative commentary as to what the new Star Wars trailer reveals plot-wise, its true “force” is surely located in the various sounds that infuse this perfectly constructed teaser.
In a media ecology defined through “interactive” behaviour – “web 2.0,” the blogging platforms now favoured by news and cultural criticism sites – a new figure has emerged from the digital abyss: the serial commenter.
The film sets up a paternalistic dynamic that overrides everything else.
AAP Image/NEWZULU/Richard Goldschmidt
The Intern is a film ostensibly about gendered and generational role reversal that quickly turns into a treatise about how much even successful young women still have to learn (from old men).
Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth is beautiful, but fails to reach the dramatic depths of other adaptions.
Tranmission Films
The latest filmmaker to try his hand at Macbeth, Justin Kurzel has delivered a cinematic masterpiece, but shies away from the wicked depths of his villains.
The emptiness that is the product of American bombs rumbles, and from within the cracks of imperialisms, both Western and Eastern, emerges an uncontrollable monster.
Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go now?
courtesy Pathe Films
The Arab Women Film Festival seeks to deconstruct misunderstandings about women in the Arab world and its diasporas, and provide a more nuanced view of the challenges faced by Arab women today.
US movie director and writer Wes Craven, who died on August 30, 2015, at the age of 76.
EPA Mondelo
I suggest we take a couple of hours tonight to watch (or re-watch) The People Under the Stairs. And then we can relegate Craven, and the film, to the dustbin of history, sticking them under the stairs where they belong.
Science in the Cinema this year sorted fact from fiction in the 1982 cult classic Bladerunner.
ElectricDynamite/flickr
Medical research can be complex and difficult to understand, but cinematic representations of mad scientists who speak gobbledygook add to the confusion. An annual event separates fact from fiction.
Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard get it on in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
a.heart.17/flickr
A gesture of desire, sexuality and the erotic, the screen kiss has often been subject to censorship and controversy. But for directors game to bend the rules, the kiss can be a subversive act.
New research shows that not all illegal downloaders are created equally.
Lee Nachtigal
David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Annie Parnell, Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Bridget Callow-Wright, Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Chloe Rickard, Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Ester Harding, Australian Film, Television and Radio School e Peter Drinkwater, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
Beginning about 20 years ago, the internet placed almost the entirety of human creation in an unguarded window display and said, in effect, help yourself. But that’s not to say all illegal downloaders are the same.