Screen

Yesterday the world’s most impressive array of frocked up celebrities congregated, as they do every year, to distribute prizes around a glorious looking room and watch show reels celebrating the work of themselves and their peers.

When the Eiffel Tower falls to the ground, when the Great Wall of China crumbles to dust, the Pyramids dissolve into sand and the Statue of Liberty is washed away, one human achievement will stand undiminished by the passage of time.

Slavery will always be a hot button issue for the American film industry, and there is something endlessly horrifying about watching depictions of it.

Have you seen director David O’Russell’s acclaimed comedy American Hustle? What a rib-tickler! Loosely based on America’s Abscam scandal, which brought about the conviction of a United States senator and six members of Congress in 1980, this side-splitting con artist caper stars Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper.

Go-getter DS Stella Gibson, played by The X-Files star Gillian Anderson, leaves stunned audiences in her wake as she has casual affairs with office colleagues, while on the hunt for a ruthless killer in the BBC UK’s cult hit thriller The Fall.

If you could go back in time whenever you liked, introduce yourself to the object of your affections again and again and keep refining your pick up moves until eventually this person fell for you, does that make you a romantic or a creep? Is it true love or an elaborate manipulation? The protagonist in About Time, the latest syrup-lacquered rom-com from Love Actually and Bridget Jones’ Diary writer/director Richard Curtis, discovers at age 21 that if he retreats to a quiet place and clenches his fists he can zap himself back to the past and relive any moment of his life.

In Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2007), a science fiction drama set in a future world where humankind no longer has the ability to procreate, several elaborate long takes evolve the film from a visually impressive work to one of gut-punching bravado.

Hollywood loves to produce a ‘buddy-cop’ film and follow a predictable and finely-tuned method for how it should play out.

The shadow Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have cast over the comic book superhero blockbuckster is so large, so bleak, and indicative of a style so doggedly averse to embracing any manner of camp or kitsch that a gritty sub-genre has emerged spawning marquee productions that are now, thanks to director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, Sucker Punch) and screenwriter David S.

There’s a lack of fictional women in top jobs across film and television, especially given the fact less than 30% of the speaking parts in Hollywood blockbusters are given to women.

Last year director Joss Whedon shredded the global box office with his big, loud, sprawling take on The Avengers, a blockbuster superhero mash-up that earned the Buffy brain trust no small amount of industry cred.

One of the world’s longest-running film fests, The Sydney Film Festival, is now underway, amd cinephiles in Australia are once again spoiled for choice.