David Court, Australian Film, Television and Radio School
We know the transformation of global media technologies pose particular challenges to local filmmakers – and that the rewards are still slim. But there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of the industry.
‘It is difficult to convey the exhilaration that can be received from recognising elements of your own intimate life magnified on a cinema screen.’ Anatomy of a Love Seen screens at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
MQFF
The curators of queer film festivals undertake a challenging task, assembling as best as possible a cinematic selection that reflects what is a very diverse community. Too often, lesbians are left out.
Julianne Moore won an Oscar for her performance in the film.
Artificial Eye
Speaking with: David Tiley on funding Australian films
CC BY-ND23,2 MB(download)
Vincent O’Donnell speaks with David Tiley, editor of ScreenHub magazine, about financing film production in Australia and looking beyond box office numbers to measure a film's success.
New technologies are allowing us to understand far more about what we see when we watch a screen.
Arthur Cruz
What are we really looking at when we watch a screen? There’s more to it than Gogglebox. Advances in eye-tracking technology are transforming how we understand film and TV spectatorship.
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman took home four awards, including Best Picture.
Mike Blake/Reuters
Indies to the rescue, the quiet power of foreign language films, Gen-X’s crowning moment. All – and more – are covered by our experts, who weigh in on this year’s Oscars.
In American Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is the ‘sheepdog’ – someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack.
Entertainment Weekly
Many are decrying the film as merely conservative propaganda. But American Sniper – as with many of Eastwood’s films – has a more nuanced approach that addresses modern anxieties.
A still shot from DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Hollywood Reporter
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
3D TV was all the rave at one time – so what happened?
Flickr/Warrenski
Television broadcasts in 3D promised to give people an extra dimension in viewing movies, sport and other entertainment but take up of the technology has not been that great. This is not the first time…
Red Army tells the story of the Russian hockey dynasty of the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on the story of defenseman Slava Fetisov (pictured top right).
Variety
Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army opens with the film’s main subject – former NHL and Soviet hockey great Viacheslav (Slava) Fetisov – giving the finger to Polsky while checking his phone. At the film’s…
The staggering amount of information in the world can be overwhelming. This is partly why genres such as detective fiction are so popular – they resonate with the human desire to control and order the…
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev and actors Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Elena Lyadova at the premier of the controversial film Leviathan.
Sebastien Nogier/EPA
The Russian film world has been in some turmoil this week. First there was news that the government was to decree that films “defiling the national culture, posing a threat to national unity and undermining…
Amid Golden Globe recognition and Oscar buzz, Damien Chazelle’s film about a young jazz student and his abusive teacher is pulling in viewers who would normally run screaming from the words “drum solo…
The movie Selma takes King – best known to Americans as an orator – and turns him into an organizer.
Wikimedia Commons
It’s been almost 60 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. became a household name during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and some may find it astonishing that, until the recent release of Selma, he’s…
Birdman is awash with in-jokes, but laugh and then forget about them. And forget about the fact that Birdman is a backstage comedy set in a crappy 800-seat theatre in New York. Because this is really a…
In The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg portrays Jim Bennet, a bored literature professor whose gambling debts spiral out of control.
POPSUGAR
“Life is a losing proposition,” explains Mark Wahlberg’s literature professor/compulsive gambler Jim Bennett. “You might as well get it over with.” Intent on doing just that, Bennett runs up massive debts…
The story of two people who fall in love.
Universal Pictures
The Theory of Everything is a film about two people who meet at university and fall in love. But what makes it remarkable is that one of them is Professor Stephen Hawking and that when he and Jane Wilde…
“It’s not even that good a story,” quips Moses during Exodus: Gods and Kings, the latest biblical blockbuster to assault our cinema screens. I think Moses was being rather harsh on himself there; it’s…
Ridley Scott’s casting choices for Exodus: Gods and Kings are emblematic of a larger, systemic problem in the entertainment industry.
Movie Pilot
Director Ridley Scott recently set off a firestorm when he dismissed those who criticized him for casting white actors as every major character in the recently released Exodus: Gods and Kings, while reserving…