The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM) kicked off last night with Bollywood’s cult classic curry-western Sholay in 3D format. This year IFFM is screening 46 films from four countries in 17 languages…
All national cinemas outside of Hollywood have to strive hard to maintain their local industries – and Australia is no exception. So Umbrella Entertainment is to be commended for re-releasing on DVD over…
In the last fortnight, senior executives from cinema operators in Australia, including Village Roadshow and Palace Cinemas, have come out defending their decision to raise movie ticket prices. But do their…
Is analogue better than digital? Is digital better than dialogue? Though the source of much heated debate, it would seem digital is now virtually unstoppable. There’s not going to be any 35mm film at the…
Hollywood’s idea of family entertainment these days largely consists in a kind of reassuring condescension. On the one hand, it must persuade us that its “means of production” — the truly staggering resources…
“Movies will never die”, writes James Wolcott in Prime Time’s Graduation, his influential 2012 essay for Vanity Fair: But TV is where the action is, the addiction forged, the dream machine operating on…
The long-anticipated biblical epic, Noah, has been released to a tidal wave of reviews, comments and criticisms on the film’s “accuracy” in its adaptation of the flood narrative in Genesis. And granted…
I’m sitting here in my office, having made several false starts on this piece, and my phone has just buzzed. My five year old son – who an hour ago accompanied me to a packed screening of The Lego Movie…
Sixty summers have now passed since one of cinema’s greatest anni mirabiles. The entire decade rears like one long Himalayan chain of artistic eminence, but no year quite matches 1954 for sheer concentrated…
The trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s Noah features a craggy-faced, bearded Hollywood star, a cast of hundreds and a host of incredibly well-rendered CGI animals. The latter might be a sign of our times…
The history of revolutionary cinema has been marked by a number of mercurial manifestos. Sergei Eisenstein, for example, believed in the brute potential of editing to activate the political senses. Fernando…
Just when you thought that pile of death-dealing demons heaped up in the bargain bin at your local Kmart couldn’t get any higher … 2014 is turning out to be yet another year of monsters at the movies…
It is a strange and transitional time in the history of cinema. As the medium itself shifts irreversibly from celluloid to computation, the last generation of true film-makers is gradually, but inevitably…
Earlier this week, a man who argued about the ending of 300: Rise of an Empire was killed by fellow film-goers in Texas. Though a tragic and solitary event, it puts the recent upsurge in ancient history…
When we watch a movie, how do we know where and when it is taking place? This is just one of the questions a production designer working on a film or TV show helps audiences answer. They do so through…
Each of the arts confers upon the cinema something of its own metier. Dance, its movement. Poetry, its structure. Theatre, its situations. Music, its rhythm. Sculpture, its salience. But painting is the…
Earlier this year The Conversation published an article by Rebecca Mostyn about the audience for Australian films. The article includes useful stats pertaining to Screen Australia’s slate of feature films…
The last man standing at the recent Academy Awards was the director/producer of the acclaimed 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen. I for one was happy, for complex reasons, to see him there; not least because…
In the new film Wolf Creek 2, the menacing outback serial killer Mick Taylor asks his unsuspecting tourist prey, “what the bloody hell are you buggers doing out here?” This phrase could equally be used…
Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki has long been considered by critics and fans alike as the epitome of animation, not only in Japan but across the world. With the release of his latest, and possibly…