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Articles on Film retrospectives
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All The President’s Men is a masterpiece of political cinema. Watching it 50 years on, it feels less historically distant than it does disturbingly prescient.
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver turns 50 this month. It is widely regarded as one of the most important American films. It is also one of the most troubling.
A century on, Battleship Potemkin’s vision of oppression, courage and collective resistance still crackles with an energy that reminds us why cinema matters.
Heat is a sprawling, epic crime thriller that profoundly shaped contemporary Hollywood action cinema. Much imitated, it has never been surpassed.
In 1955, Ealing Studios released The Ladykillers, a darkly comic tale about a gang of criminals whose bank robbery gets derailed by their elderly landlady.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom has been described by film critics as ‘essential to have seen but impossible to watch’.
Spinal Tap is back. But 41 years on, the original is still one of the sharpest and most influential comedies ever made.
Tim Curry’s astounding work often overshadows the many other dynamic performances from the film’s chorus of alluring oddballs.
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is a contemporary American take on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic crime drama High and Low.
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock was released in 1975. Beneath its haunting beauty, the film challenges the idea of colonial control.
The Man from Hong Kong remains an exhilarating piece of pure cinema, despite its relatively small budget.
In 1955, director Charles Laughton crafted one of the darkest, strangest fairytales ever to come out of Hollywood.
Jaws was only the second feature film for the 28-year-old Steven Spielberg – and it would become a cultural smash.
One iconic scene unfolds underwater. We see swimmers’ legs flailing, and not much else – but John Williams’ masterful audio signals the terror lurking below.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Sunday Too Far Away for the fledgling South Australian Film Corporation.
Filmed as war raged across Europe, Children of Paradise is a masterpiece: a nostalgic love letter to Paris, the theatre and the spirit of resistance.
In 1999, decades after Walt Disneys’s death and nine years of production, Disney’s dream of a new Fantasia was realised with the release of Fantasia 2000.
Other Frankenstein parodies are more about the gags than well-crafted narrative and character. That’s where Young Frankenstein excels.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a fascinating composite of both 1970s New Hollywood and the legacy of the women’s centred melodrama of the 1930s and 1940s.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor of French Studies, Adelaide University
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Senior Lecturer, Media Studies and Production, University of Southern Queensland
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Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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Lecturer in Creative Production and Performance, Western Sydney University
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Associate professor in Cinema and Media Studies, RMIT University
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Composer and Lecturer in Screen Composition, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
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Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, RMIT University
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Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University
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Assistant Professor, Bond University
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Professor of History, President, Australian Historical Association, Macquarie University
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Teaching Fellow in Music, University of Otago
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Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
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Sessional Academic in Screen Arts, Curtin University
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Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film, Adelaide University