Earlier this week, the national board of SAG-AFTRA (the actors’ union) voted to keep Duncan Crabtree-Ireland in charge until June 2032 and to add ‘CEO’ to his title. The announcement didn’t mention ...

I measured every second of sound in 1,423 films, including 478 sound Oscar nominees, to test an old Hollywood joke.

I traced the backing behind 3,044 features selected by Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto to find out how many got there cold.

De Luca and Abdy, we hear, ran Digger through their analytical comps system. The combo of Cruise and Iñárritu justified a $125M production greenligiht. Three weeks before Digger opened, De Luca told ...

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of watching American Graffiti (1973) at the ActOne Cinema in Acton, and then listening to Mark Kermode quiz Walter Murch about how he built its sound. Murch ...

In early 1986, Frank Oz held preview screenings of Little Shop of Horrors in San Jose. He stayed faithful to the musical it was based on, so the movie climaxed with both Seymour and Audrey dying, the ...

Despite the massive changes in production, exhibition, and home entertainment over the past twenty years, it’s always surprising to me how similar the sales side of the film business has remained. The ...

If you’re an avid reader of culture journalists, then it seems as though there is always some country or other “taking over Hollywood”. In the 2000s it was the Australians. In the 2010s it was the ...

I saw Spider-Man: Far From Necessary over the weekend and, like everyone else in the cinema, I sat through the entire end crawl to watch the ‘post-credits scene’ that has become so ubiquitous among ...

Last week I gave a keynote at the Locarno Film Festival, following a request by the organisers to give the well-connected audience a ‘slap in the face’. This is exactly the kind of brief I relish, so ...

Every year, tens of thousands of screenwriters pay to enter contests. A major selling point for them is that winning (or placing highly) will mean that the right people will finally read your script.