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 ...

How tall does Tom Cruise look in his movies? I measured 8 million frames from 2,000 films to find out whether Hollywood's ...

At every grade, the films watched mostly by women get the lower IMDb rating. Among films graded A or A+ on opening night, the ...

A few days ago, a new UK film distributor, True Brit Entertainment, went into administration. It had been launched under three years ago, intending to co-finance $150m of British films. In the end, it ...

Twelve US states have just ordered the new Paramount / Warner studio to release 30 films a year. I crunched the data on 170,279 films to see what happened to the middle they are trying to bring back ...

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 ...

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.

Marketing is a key part of any film’s success, but training and case studies are much more likely to focus on the filmmaking than on film promotion. So I went looking for real-world examples of indie ...

Let’s start with the seemingly incongruous situation. Hollywood as an industry has been honing its craft for well over a century. Given the power, prestige, and money on offer, it attracts some of the ...

Since 2005, Franklin Leonard has run an annual survey of film industry insiders, asking for their favourite screenplays of the year that have not yet been made. The result, the Black List, has become ...

I have received a few questions from readers about the path to becoming a top movie director, prompted by a recent Substack post entitled “The Annenberg Ouroboros” by Hollywood Gadfly. The chart below ...