As kids move into their tween years, they usually leave their early-childhood loves behind. The music of The Wiggles falls away, to be replaced by K-pop, boy bands and rap music. TV programs that once fuelled their imaginations and viewing habits are

It’s just after midnight on 9 August 1969. Actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) – who once starred as bounty hunter Jake Cahill in a now-cancelled cowboy TV series called ‘Bounty Law’ – is in his Los Angeles home, drunkenly making frozen margaritas,

More often than not, Cinema Science introductions include a passing reference to the chosen film’s or franchise’s box-office takings. While I’m loath to overemphasise the importance of a film’s profitability or lack thereof – in stark contrast to a l

Secret Sunshine is an appropriate text for senior secondary students, and may relate to learning outcomes in Media Arts, Philosophy and Korean. It is recommended that teachers watch the film beforehand to gauge its appropriateness for use as a classr

A melancholy piano score plays over a montage of similar images. Two people, faces unseen, reach out for each other’s hands in a range of everyday situations: walking together, climbing a tree, sitting at a table, lying by a pool. The pairs come clos

William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is a perennial staple of required-reading lists in secondary schools. And, with it, Peter Brook’s 1963 cinematic adaptation of the book is routinely wheeled out in front of classes. Unlike the book, the

Arnhem Land. Smoke billows from a small tuft of green ironwood leaves, rustling in the wind. Two men hold a portable hard drive up to the smoke. This hard drive, the narrator tells us, contains the raw files for the film we are about to watch. Etche

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most renowned filmmakers of all time, albeit with a daunting reputation for being a master of slow cinema and the formidably esoteric. When describing the Russian director’s films, it is almost impossible not to reach f

This column has had a pretty standard structure until now: (a) present problem; (b) present solution in the form of an app or website that is (hopefully) free and (usually) device-agnostic; (c) direct snide swipes at deputy principals (primarily ther

When Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright) was released in 2010, it was considered a major box-office flop. Based on a series of graphic novels by Canadian artist Bryan Lee O’Malley, the screen adaptation was a big-budget studio affair. The proj

‘I like to watch.’ That’s unquestionably the defining line from Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember it as a punchline. It’s twice delivered by protagonist Chance (Peter Sellers) in response to being propositioned

Let’s begin at the end. Celebrated director David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) concludes with the melancholic image of a New Orleans storeroom being flooded by the rising waters unleashed by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. A

How equipped is the language of cinema to articulate the nuances of memory? The breadth and scope of accumulated experience, the density of stored images, sensations and sounds? And what of those faltering, time-breached memories that elude capture,

Not long after its fifth and final episode aired, HBO and Sky’s miniseries Chernobyl became the highest-rated television series on the Internet Movie Database.1 It would be easy to assume that this popularity is at least partially due to the tragic n

The more honest among us will readily admit that our memories of our early secondary school years are riddled with awkwardness, acne and a lot of general confusion. Adolescence is a time when our friendships become complicated, our bodies betray us a

The Sisters Brothers (2018) is the eighth feature by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, but it’s his first in the English language, and the first to take him outside of France. It’s also a change of pace, in terms of both tone and genre. Audiard is be

Released just under a quarter of a century ago, Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) was an experiment of sorts. This tale of what children’s toys get up to when left to their own devices was Pixar’s first foray into feature film and, most notably, was al

When I mentioned this project to a friend in England, he wrote: ‘I never knew Australian westerns existed!’ This led me to ponder what I understood by the term ‘western’. Certainly, the term has most commonly been associated with American films that

Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) and its follow-up, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Gunn, 2017), heralded a refreshing direction for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The relative unfamiliarity of the characters and storylines to a mains

Have you ever felt suffocated by your nine-to-five job? Have you dreamt of throwing in the towel and pursuing an entirely different lifestyle? This dream has become a reality for many of the participants featured in The Meaning of Vanlife (2019), a n

Indigenous Australians’ lives are too often overlooked by politicians, media organisations and the broader sphere of middle-class Australia. In light of this, director Maya Newell’s feature documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019) provides tremendous i

Climate change is perhaps the most serious crisis human beings have ever faced. Human-caused global warming is already upon us, and it has contributed to increased temperatures; extreme weather events, such as massive storms, unprecedented drought, f

1 See Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Times Books, New York, 2010. 2 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018, , accessed 16 September 2019. 3 See David Walla

Claire Denis may well be the greatest female filmmaker in the history of cinema – but what’s for sure is that she hates that label. ‘When you say “female director” I already want to stop this conversation!’ Denis declaimed in a 2018 interview. ‘Femal

1 Claire Denis, quoted in Donald Clarke, ‘Claire Denis: “We Are Normal People. Even Though We Are French”’, The Irish Times, 14 April 2018,

‘This show will wreck your evening, your whole life and your day.’ These words ring out from the opening titles of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, breaking the fourth wall and more – warning away the audience, but doing so in a way that inv