Animation is all around us – from Pixar to manga to animated gifs. As with any creative field, it has its unsung heroes – the innovators who have shaped and defined the art form. So it was a great delight…
This article contains spoilers. Some reviewers have somewhat lazily compared Amma Asante’s recently opened film Belle to the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, that other film about slavery. But this entirely…
The Sydney Film Festival concluded last night with the announcement of the winner of the Sydney Film Prize, a not insignificant award for best film in the Official Competition. It was awarded this year…
It has been almost a truism of television, in the discussions of professionals and the analyses of academics, that television broadcasting is a sound medium with added pictures, while cinema is a visual…
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 challenge for the documentary filmmaker is to persuade the viewer to take the images and sounds with which they are presented for the world itself. The documentary viewer willingly collaborates in…
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…
For me the most exciting way to negotiate the ample program of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) is to focus on its retrospectives, and this year the lens is on the American film directors Robert Altman and…
Out of all the intoxicating phrases that emerge from the study of film, my personal favourite is mise-en-scène, translated from French to mean: what is in the frame. The phrase conjures up the splendour…
In 2011, as one popular uprising after another swept across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and beyond, the Arab spring (more commonly referred to in Arabic as al-thawrat al-arabiyya, “the…
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…
History is generally made of things that happen. This truth often prejudices us to ignore the importance of the things that don’t. In this spirit, I would like to bring attention to the significance of…
In the last year there’s been a resurgence of media engagement with the Suffragettes, the most militant wing of the first wave feminist movement between 1890 and 1919. It began with two television programmes…
The extent to which the Dominique Strauss Kahn scandal is still a raw wound in France has been made very clear after Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York was screened in Cannes – out of the main film festival…
Take one brooding hunk, enslaved as a gladiator after the brutal slaughter of his family, who seeks revenge against the evil Roman empire. Lay on plenty of set-piece spectacular arena battles through which…
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…
It’s 50 years since Mods and Rockers rumbled by the sea in Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton; since their images were captured for posterity in iconic black and white photos of deck chairs being thrown…
The world has plenty of monsters – more than enough, really. Several thousand years of art and literature and nightmares have provided us all the terrifying beings we could ever need. Maybe this is why…
The run up to the release of Lenny Abrahamson’s latest film, Frank, was characterised by a certain amount of perplexity. Unsurprising, given the posters emblazoned with that enormous papier-mâché mask…
Last month a major restructure at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra was announced, including a tranche of job cuts and the closure of the Arc cinema. Many in the film community were…