A Beginner's Guide To...

Ethan Hunt: super-spy, quasi-leader of top-secret government agency, and foundation of $2 billion film franchise. The humble 1960s American television show on which the series is based has been left far...

Pixar’s return with this summer’s critical darling Inside Out marks the end of a hiatus of sorts for the studio. It has been two years since Pixar released Monsters University, the moderately well-received...

The Western genre is sumptuously classical, historically entwined with cinema since its birth - and yet it is also helplessly turbulent, subject to postcolonial criticism for the histories it depicts in its...

Post-colonial theory sounds like something best left in a textbook, but in the context of a film industry that still limits characters of colour to sidekicks and stereotypes, it is worthy of broader...

It seems somewhat condescending to you, the reader, to begin this article with something as basic as "What IS the Cannes Film Festival?" - yet this isn't an entirely stupid question. The Festival means...

Simply, if you haven’t heard of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which you totally have if you’ve been anywhere near a cinema, TV, billboard, another person or a Burger King since 2008): they are a series of...

It seems that, nowadays, pretty much any band or artist you care to name from any genre of music has a documentary about them - which understandably makes it difficult to know where to begin. Never fear, ORWAV...

Where does one begin with Keanu Reeves? Recently endowed with an (un)healthy dose of the Nic Cage effect – that is, being caught on the slippery slope of diminishing returns – Keanu is now one of the most...

Robert Altman’s name may well be familiar to many and yet he often remains something of a cipher to all but the most ardent film fans. Subversive, difficult, independent, prolific, genius; these are just a...

You might forgive a general consensus that more is better in relation to a film’s running time; with avid fans fawning over myths of extra footage, deleted scenes, and unseen cuts, it is not hard to imagine...

Christmas is without doubt a charming time of year, but it is fair to say, certainly in the Western world, that it has grown into a somewhat superficial one also, and the festive season usually brings out the...

Today it’s almost impossible to conceive that in the mid to late 1920s the notion of putting sound to film was received with repudiation, reluctance, and even hostility, even in the immediate aftermath of...

New Hollywood isn’t actually that new at all; in fact, the name demarcates a period of intense creativity, crisis, and change that occurred between the late 1960s and the early 1980s within the Hollywood...

Film is now most often perceived as a vehicle for telling stories, but that was not always the case. Despite the fact that key aspects of the narrative film such as scripts, sets, and acting ensembles, had...

Over the last eighteen years writer-director Alexander Payne has gradually established himself as an expert in reflecting his American milieu, drawing unlikely comedy from touching small-town drama. Although a...