Gary Collinson selects his Five Essential Arnie Characters… With the recent news that ‘The Governator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back – having filmed a scene alongside fellow action icons Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis for Sly’s upcoming macho-fest The Expendables – we mark his long-anticipated return to the screen with our Five Essential Arnie Characters… […]

Trevor Hogg details the early days of Pixar in the first of a three-part feature on the phenomenally successful animation studio… Realizing that he could not draw, aspiring animator Ed Catmull decided to change his academic focus to physics and computer science. “In the early 1970s, I headed to graduate school at the University of […]

Santosh Sandhu discusses the Hong Kong Film Industry… Hong Kong has a population of about 7 million people. Despite its small size, Hong Kong has been a major player in world cinema for many years. Up to the mid 1990s, Hong Kong was the world’s third largest film producer, making 300 films a year in […]

Renowned French filmmaker Claude Chabrol has passed away today aged 80. Beginning his career as a film critic alongside contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut with the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Chabrol helped to usher in the French New Wave with his self-financed debut feature Le beau Serge […]

In the third of a series of articles examining the various screen incarnations of George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, we focus on the final instalment of the Imperial trilogy, Episode VI – Return of the Jedi… Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, 1983. Directed by Richard Marquand. Starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, […]

Trevor Hogg profiles the careers of filmmaking siblings the Coen brothers in the first of a four part feature… Using a Super 8 camera, Joel and his younger brother Ethan were inspired to remake the Hollywood movies being broadcasted on television; their naivety about motion picture production did not hinder their innovative spirit when shooting […]

Amy Flinders profiles Scottish director Lynne Ramsay in the second of a two-part feature… read part one here. With three critically acclaimed shorts and a mantelpiece full of awards, Ramsay won another cluster of prizes, including a BAFTA for most promising newcomer, for her first feature Ratcatcher (1999). When asked how the idea of Ratcatcher […]

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of visionary director Robert Zemeckis in the third of a three part feature… read part one and part two. Adapting Winston Groom’s story of a simple-minded man who meets various historical figures from the twentieth century, while wandering in and out of the life of his childhood sweetheart, served as […]

Trevor Hogg profiles the career of legendary British filmmaker Carol Reed in the second of a two-part feature… read the first part here. “I don’t think people care what sort of curtains I have,” stated the British filmmaker. “I don’t think they care about the technical people. Stars are the draw. They earn their publicity. […]

Tom Conran with his thoughts on an early screening in Sheffield and Q&A with Shane Meadows, Paddy Considine and Mark Herbert… Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee (2009). Directed by Shane Meadows. Starring Paddy Considine, Dean Palinczuk and Olivia Coleman. Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine reunite for the first time since Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) in this […]