Boyhood is the front-runner in this year’s Sydney Film Festival Competition, to be decided on Sunday. In it, American writer and director Richard Linklater looks at a young boy’s life from the beginning…
The Sydney Film Festival Offical Competition this year has featured a range of male (and a few female) protagonists who are either without domicile, or whose domicile is severely threatened. I have already…
The phone connection illuminates the dashboard screen. “Ivan Locke,” says the man behind the wheel. “Ivan. Where are you?” says a woman’s voice. “I’m in the car,” he replies. This direct way of answering…
The Sydney Film Festival (SFF) opened last night, kicking off not only one of the landmark cultural events of the city, but a program that draws films from almost 50 countries throughout the world. As…
In June 2013, at a University of Southern California event with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg predicted an implosion of the film industry. The failure at the box office of “tentpoles”, mega-budget movies…
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…