Australia’s defining narratives are apparently, with rare exception, stories by, for and about white cis men. We need more than Screen Australia’s new measures to address gender equity in the film industry.
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.
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.
“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 and 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.
Idris Elba stars in Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation.
Netflix
By avoiding major cineplexes and going straight to Netflix subscribers, the critically acclaimed Beasts of No Nation is wading into some uncharted waters.
The anti-communist pogrom in Indonesia 50 years ago not only destroyed human lives but also significant cultural works made by the country’s left-inspired artists.
Molodec/www.shutterstock.com
Arguably Indonesia’s most significant leftist film director and theorist, Bachtiar Siagian, was among the millions who fell prey to the communist purge carried out between 1965 and 1966.
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.
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.
Viewers can stand, sit, or be positioned in patterns and relations that breach the traditional movie theatre encounter.
Breaching Transmissions/Images courtesy of MIFF
Expanded cinema, a term coined in the mid-1960s by American experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, extends and enriches the way cinema can engage with its viewers. The art form is taken into galleries…
This film conveys a uniquely Australian sensibility, at equal turns calm and intense.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Filmed in 29 days on a shoestring budget, Downriver’s bush setting and narrative twists give it an expansive feel. It is a visually stunning piece, with superb performances and an utterly gripping story.
Set in what seems like an eternal dusk, Tangerine is breathtaking in its beauty and garishness.
Images courtesy of MIFF
US director Sean Baker’s Tangerine is a film that’s queer in both storyline and filmmaking approach. Featuring trans actors and shot on an iPhone 5S, it teases with ideas of authenticity and truth.
Adapting a much-loved text is always a delicate task as the audience can be fiercely protective.
Sydney Film Festival
Holding the Man, the screen adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s much-loved memoir, has seen audiences laughing, then sobbing at its devastating portrayal of AIDS in Australia. It’s an important story to tell.
Liv Corfixen’s documentary seems motivated by a fascination and fear of immersion in the creative process.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Liv Corfixen’s documentary about her husband captures the creative pressure and mounting doubt following the unexpected success of his most commercially viable film, Drive.
Périot neither condemns nor romanticises extreme ‘resistance’ and ‘revolutionary’ actions, nor the state’s response.
Images courtesy of MIFF
Germany’s Red Army Faction evolved from student protest to bombings, kidnappings and shootouts with police. The group transformed dissent into spectacular media event. This documentary picks up the story.