Close-Up

In its cinema vérité style, Weekend presents a modern gay love story in an understated and direct way. By doing so, director Andrew Haigh has created a film where homosexuality is not the main plot point,...

There is a moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice - a frenetic, dope-fuelled odyssey based upon Thomas Pynchon’s novel - in which Joaquin Phoenix’s drug-addled private eye Doc...

A hundred years on from the outbreak of war in 1914, the mark it left on its descendants is still felt deeply across Europe. The loss of one million men, with thousands of them still buried somewhere in the...

- In nature, there are boundaries. - The story of Timothy Treadwell is a tale of obsession and a portrait of insanity, two themes that consistently prick up the ears of German director Werner Herzog. For...

According to its audience, Scarlett Johansson's ass-kicker action movie Lucy isn't all that good at a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 45%. Our own Cameron Ward gave it a 3 out of 5. “There to entertain”...

The last time we paused to recount the efforts of one of Hollywood’s most unsung tribes – that of the women screenwriter – we stopped just as silent cinema led into the talkies and a new era arrived in...

When people ask Quentin Tarantino if he went to film school, he tells them ‘no, I went to films.’ With ways to express the love for the cinema as diverse as film itself, actually creating the art one loves...

Since the millennium, there have been a number of shifts and developments in the world of film. One such shift, however, has skirted under the radar. Films which claim to be ‘based on real events’ are more...

“It’s the writer’s job to get screwed. Writers are the women of the movie business” – Nora Ephron, 1993 Writers have always received the short end of the movie making stick, going unnoticed as...

"Let's not talk about the good old times, but the bad new ones." - Bertolt Brecht In recent years the cinema has frequently been talked about as a lost cause. Regardless of the fact that home viewing was...

There is a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) when the three main characters race through the Louvre in Paris, attempting to break a world record. A direct reference to Bande à Part (1964),...

Long before the superhero movie took the words "gritty reboot" and revolutionised a genre, period drama was working quietly away in the background doing exactly the same thing. As the '90s gave way to a...

Ask someone what they think of when you mention 1990s period drama and they might just say "Merchant Ivory" - even if they don't know what that means. Launched in 1961, the production powerhouse has become...

Period piece. Costume drama. Historical epic. Any way you slice it, it's been around about as long as cinema itself. Of course, in those days what we now consider quintessential period drama was practically...

- "Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY" - Dogme 95 (sometimes known as Dogma or Dogma 95) was an avant-garde movement in film production started by Danish-born directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in...