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The globalisation of the Chinese film industry

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Exploring the worlds favourite film genre

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The Best Disaster Movies of All Time from A to Z

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THE BEST UPCOMING MOVIES 2023 (Trailers)

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THE BEST UPCOMING MOVIES 2023 (Trailers)

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THE BEST UPCOMING MOVIES 2023 (Trailers)

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Top 5 Things I Love About Studying Film Studies

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Top 5 Things I Love About Studying Film Studies

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As a Second-Year student here at King's, there are several things about my degree that I have come to value the more time I've spent here. Here are the top 5 things I love about studying Film Studies.

1. The Films

It seems almost too obvious to say: Film Studies at King's gives you the opportunity any cinephile would want; to watch countless brilliant movies. There are normally weekly screenings for each of your modules. These include works from filmmakers with a diverse range in backgrounds, identities, and styles. While some of these films are classics, what I find most exciting is watching underground, unknown films by filmmakers all over the world. We recently watched a documentary called Videograms of a Revolution in my second-year Television Studies module, and despite the fact I'd never heard of the film before, it immediately became one of my all-time favourites. This opportunity and access films I would otherwise never have seen or learnt about is one of the best things about studying film in an academic capacity. Some of the films we screen are not widely distributed, or hard to come by, so a screening is a rare delight. In addition to weekly screenings, simply studying in London also allows you access to several independent cinemas and film events throughout the year. Modules and the film selections change each year, so there is always something new to discover if you choose to study Film Studies at King's.

2. Community

Film Studies also has a great community of like-minded people. Each year has a moderately small number of students, and as a result you can get to know the student body across your seminars. This provides a great opportunity to make friends outside of your accommodation or in societies. Having friends on your course allows you to not only discuss what you're learning, but also creates a fun environment of people to see in class every day.

3. Resources

The other thing I love about studying Film here at King's is the incredible variety of resources at your disposal - including loads of theoretical and academic writing on film available at the library. The Maughan library near Strand Campus (where humanities and arts have their classes) also has many films available to watch. The Strand Campus is located just across the Thames from the British Film Institute (BFI), which is home to fantastic screenings and a Mediatheque of classic films for you to inspect. It's also home to the BFI Reuben Library, where you can study and look at an array of film journals and books. Being in London means the amount of film-related resources at your disposal is arguably better than anywhere else in the country.

4. Transferable skills

A Film Studies degree actually covers a wide amount of content - from historical context, social conventions, and to the psychology behind films. As a result, the amount of transferable skills and knowledge you acquire is surprising. You'll gain presentation and speaking skills in seminars and the ability to organise and analyse when working on your academic essays. The work you'll do researching and watching films is applicable in the workplace, and life in general. I recently worked on a TEDx talk at university and used what I'd learnt from writing film essays when structuring, researching, and performing the talk.

5. Personnel

The lecturers and seminar leaders here at King's are experts in their fields, who are not only approachable individuals, but provide insights and criticism on cinema that are engaging and interesting. Having lecturers who are passionate and knowledgeable in the field of film makes your modules far more interesting, and the fantastic personnel here at King's have made attending classes compelling.

Read More

Check out the Jack's other blog on extra-curricular activities offered at King's, including Film Society.

For information on a Film Studies MA program see Isabella's Day in the Life of a Film Studies MA Student.

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Top 5 Things I Love About Studying Film Studies

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As a Second-Year student here at King's, there are several things about my degree that I have come to value the more time I've spent here. Here are the top 5 things I love about studying Film Studies. 1.

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As a sociology student in Sheffield in the 1960s, I was part of a thriving film society scene at the university and in the city. So, when Sheffield Polytechnic launched an extramural course in film study a few years later, I was eager to sign up to the budding discipline of film studies. By the late 1970s I had joined the editorial board of the journal Screen and was teaching on a pioneering postgraduate film studies course at the Polytechnic of Central London. Film studies was wide open - a discipline in the process of inventing itself - and it was exciting to be at the cutting edge. But it wasn't as new as it seemed: film studies, inside and outside the academy, had already been decades in the making.

A scene from the 1919 film 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari'. Photo by Universal History Archive / Getty Images

The earliest serious writings on film and cinema began to appear soon after medium's birth, and the 1920s saw the publication of the first historical accounts of cinema and the launch of some critical journals. By the end of the 1930s, the idea of including film appreciation in school curricula had been put into practice in the UK, the US, and elsewhere. This venture was prompted by a variety of sometimes contradictory motives, including a social reform agenda originating from a desire to mitigate the supposedly harmful influence of films on children, and a cultural appreciation approach which aimed to foster informed responses to films. A key objective of introducing popular media like film into the classroom was to educate children's responses to the sounds and images that were part of their everyday lives; to teach them to discriminate, in other words.

Efforts to introduce the study of films and cinema into higher education predated film teaching in schools: in the US, a course called 'Photoplay Composition', launched at Columbia University in 1915, was the first of several similar initiatives. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the idea of a new scholarly discipline, with its own body of knowledge and academic presence, began to take wider hold. In France in the late 1940s the filmologie movement had called for a serious study of film, and the 1950s saw several efforts at naming the field; 'cinematology' was one suggestion. By the 1970s, though, film studies had become the most widely adopted name for the discipline.

Film studies in this period was committed to taking popular cinema seriously, with the aim of creating new knowledge, developing a rigorous approach towards theorising, and advancing a critical consideration of the forms, styles and themes of Hollywood cinema in particular. Beyond Hollywood, a selection of film movements and national cinemas were addressed, including the avant gardes of the first decade of Soviet cinema and the films associated with 1920s German Expressionism. What Is Cinema?, an English-language edition of the writings of Cahiers du cinéma critic André Bazin, was published in 1971 and formed a basis for influential work around medium specificity and realism and cinema. By the 1980s, a militant strand of film theory and analysis had produced protocols for 'against-the-grain' and symptomatic readings of Hollywood films, a trend which became controversially associated with Screen.

A poster for the 1925 film 'Battleship Potemkin'. Photo by Swim Ink 2, LLC / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Since the 1990s, a shift of attention broadly away from Hollywood and towards world cinema has gone hand-in-hand with engagements with area studies and modern language studies. The digital revolution and the accompanying media convergence and rise of digital cinema have prompted the reappearance in the film studies agenda of fundamental questions (What is cinema?, What is the relationship between cinema and the real?), as well as new debates around the 'death' of cinema, all revitalised by new film-philosophical inquiry.

Today, film studies is a popular choice for students at all levels of higher education, with introductory curricula typically including studies in film history, film genres, national cinemas, film criticism and analysis, and film theory. Students often ask about the relationship between scholarly film studies and filmmaking; and while a film studies degree is not a preparation for a career in film production, many undergraduate courses do offer production modules alongside students' core critical, historical, and theoretical studies. As practice as research, filmmaking has also become widely accepted in the field as a mode of scholarly inquiry in its own right.

Annette Kuhn is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004 and is in the Academy's Culture, Media and Performance (CMP) section. She is co-author, with Guy Westwell, of the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies. This blog post is adapted from the entry on film studies in the Dictionary's second edition, due to be published in April 2020.

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As a sociology student in Sheffield in the 1960s, I was part of a thriving film society scene at the university and in the city. So, when Sheffield Polytechnic launched an extramural course in film study a few years later, I was eager to sign up to the budding discipline of film studies.

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CHINA IS BECOMING EVEN MORE POPULAR WITH MOVIES THAN AMERICA?

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THE WANDERING EARTH II (2023) Official International Trailer | In North American Theaters January 22

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Check out acclaimed film critic, Mark Kermode's film of the week!

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Check out acclaimed film critic, Mark Kermode's film of the week!

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"The director of the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water has turned the timeless fable into a magical Mussolini-era parable"

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eath and fascism may not seem ideal subjects for a life-affirming fantasy animation for grownup children of all ages. Yet Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro, whose 2017 masterpiece The Shape of Water won the Oscar for best picture, brings his monstrous cinematic skills to bear on Carlo Collodi's timeless fable with miraculous results, turning it into a Mussolini-era parable about a "lethal form of control and paternity". Using the tactility of stop-motion animation to lend splintery weight (both physical and emotional) to the story, Del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, whose credits include Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), conjure a tale of war and childhood that nods its wooden head towards Mary Shelley while thematically sitting alongside Del Toro's Spanish-language masterpieces The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006).

Along with co-writer Patrick McHale (Matthew Robbins gets a "screen story" credit), Del Toro resituates Collodi's source in the between-the-war years of the 20th century. Carpenter Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) has lost his beloved son, Carlo, in the Great War. One night, drunk on grief, he cuts down the tree by Carlo's grave and builds a ramshackle puppet ( Gris Grimly's illustrations provide structural inspiration) to replace his lost child. When a blue spirit breathes life into the puppet, Geppetto is initially terrified of the whirling dervish unleashed in his home. But the pair soon settle down, with Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) helping Geppetto repair the huge crucified Christ that hangs like a tortured marionette in the church where congregants shriek about demonic puppets. "Everybody likes him," says Pinocchio, pointing up at what looks like a prop from Ken Russell's The Devils (1971). "He's made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?"

This is just one of many profoundly philosophical questions (another is: "How can Mussolini's fascists use an unkillable wooden soldier as a weapon?") that Del Toro's Pinocchio is not afraid to raise. While previous film adaptations, from Disney's still strange 1940 cartoon to Robert Zemeckis's ghastly 2022 live-action reboot, have prioritised a populist litany of instructional morals (honour your father, do not tell lies, do not be lazy), Del Toro's version celebrates its antihero's agent-of-chaos nature, using his adventures to investigate matters of life and death with equal vigour.

Cinematographer Frank Passingham directed his crew to The Godfather for lighting references

Yes, Pinocchio is bequeathed a conscience in the form of a talking cricket, a character who (let us not forget) Pinocchio killed with a hammer early on in Collodi's original. But Ewan McGregor's narrator Sebastian J Cricket is no pious stooge; nor is the Fairy with the Turquoise Hair (whom Collodi also declares dead) a beneficent bestower of "real boy" human status. Instead, she is a multi-eyed Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) with one foot in the grave, whose underworld alter ego tells Pinocchio that the only path to life is (guess what?) death - the very thing that gives life value.

While it's tempting to compare this version of Pinocchio with Matteo Garrone's 2019 labour of love, there's a closer bond with Steven Spielberg's still underrated 2001 sci-fi fantasy : Artificial Intelligence. Like Spielberg, Del Toro is fascinated by the Frankenstein elements of a story in which monsters are not what they seem, and the attainment of "humanity" is portrayed as a flawed venture that must be solved through narrative poetry rather than physical transformation. Both directors also embrace the surreal visual spectacle of a story that sends its characters into the belly of the beast via grotesquely gaping jaws, with Del Toro also cheekily tipping his hat towards Spielberg's most explosive creature feature.

While puppets creative supervisor Georgina Hayns looked to the "realism with an abstract brush stroke" of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, cinematographer Frank Passingham, whose credits include Aardman's Chicken Run (2000) and Laika studio's 2016 feature Kubo and the Two Strings, directed his crew to The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) for lighting references. With a vulpine Christoph Waltz and a freaky-monkey Cate Blanchett joining Ron Perlman, John Turturro and Finn Wolfhard in the voice cast, and Alexandre Desplat on composer duties (Del Toro co-wrote song lyrics for earworm heartbreakers such as the Oscar-tipped Ciao Papa), this is starry fare indeed. Yet ultimately, it's the film's sheer strangeness - that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro's most personal works - that makes this sing and fly.

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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio review - a superbly strange stop-motion animation

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eath and fascism may not seem ideal subjects for a life-affirming fantasy animation for grownup children of all ages. Yet Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro, whose 2017 masterpiece The Shape of Water won the Oscar for best picture, brings his monstrous cinematic skills to bear on Carlo Collodi's timeless fable with miraculous results, turning it into a Mussolini-era parable about a "lethal form of control and paternity".

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30 Awesome Behind The Scenes Shots From Famous Movies

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30 Awesome Behind The Scenes Shots From Famous Movies

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Take a look behind the scenes of some of the worlds most famous films.

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Have you ever noticed how you believe everything you see in a dream no matter how unrealistic it is? Interestingly, the same applies to movies. Sometimes we get carried away by a movie so much that a flying man, a wizard or talking aliens don't look strange at all.

However, it doesn't mean that the audience will eat whatever they are fed. Creating believable illusions is harder than it might look. For those who are interested, most of the movie DVDs feature the behind-the-scenes section, showing how the creators managed to deceive you. Even then, however, you seldom get to see the 'true' making of the film.

To fill that gap, sobadsogood shared some fantastic behind-the-scenes photos from famous movies. We liked that list so much that we thought to add a couple more and share it with you!

1. Ghostbusters

2. Terminator

3. Star Wars

4. Inception

5. Back to the Future

6. Stanley Kubrick with his daughter on The Shining

7. Django Unchained

8. Planet of the Apes

9. The Godfather: Fish-line Bullet Holes

10. Titanic

P.S.: the re-release of Titanic in 3D revealed that there was enough place for both of them on that floating door.

11. The Lord of The Rings

12. The Muppet Movie

13. The Dark Knight

14. The Hobbit

15. E.T.

16. Superman

17. The Gate

18. Harry Potter

19. Filming The Empire Strikes Back Credits Roll

20. Jaws

21. The Matrix

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30 Awesome Behind The Scenes Shots From Famous Movies

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Creating believable illusions is harder than it might look. For those who are interested, most of the movie DVDs feature the behind-the-scenes section, showing how the creators managed to deceive you. Even then, however, you seldom get to see the 'true' making of the film.

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Movies with Ali Plumb - Becoming Dumbledore

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Movies with Ali Plumb - Becoming Dumbledore

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Jude Law (with a little help from one Eddie Redmayne) talks about how he tackled one of the most beloved characters in the Wizarding World, the wisest of all wizards, Professor Albus Dumbledore.

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Movies With Ali Plumb - Becoming...: Dumbledore

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Jude Law talks about how he tackled one of the Wizarding World’s most beloved characters.

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The Best Films of 2020 - According to Empire

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The Best Films of 2020 - According to Empire

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As 2022 closes out, it’s been another banger year for brilliant TV – dragons flew, rings were forged, rebels rose, and Saul made his final call. This year’s greatest TV series brought incredible writing, considerable spectacle, emotional character journeys, and innovative genre spins, emerging from homegrown talent and international streaming behemoths alike.

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Streaming on: BBC iPlayer

There are an abundance of emergency service dramas on our televisions at any one time, but few are quite as impactful as The Responder, BBC's five-part series following Martin Freeman's Chris Carson, a police officer pushed closer and closer to the edge every day by the soul-sapping situations he has to deal with. This is Tony Schumacher's screenwriting debut, his past life as a copper lending a bleak authenticity to his remarkably lean script - and Freeman is on impeccable form, putting in a powerful performance as a man worn down by the grim realities of his work, but who still wants to do some good in the world. Similarly to This Is Going To Hurt, this is thrilling TV that brings the stark reality of blue-light life into full, fascinating focus.

Streaming on: Disney+

Battling both Covid delays and star Jeff Bridges' cancer diagnosis, it's almost a miracle that The Old Man was finished, let alone turned out as well as it did. Black Sails duo Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg adapted Thomas Perry's 2017 novel, and the result is much more than just Bridges kicking arse and taking names. It's a layered character study of a man whose sins have come roaring out of the past, and how that impacts those around him. Alongside the main man as ex-CIA agent Dan Chase, there was solid work from John Lithgow (as his former handler-turned-hunter), Alia Shawkat as Lithgow's star intelligence analyst and Amy Brenneman as a woman who is unexpectedly drawn into Chase's orbit.

Read the Empire review of The Old Man.

Streaming on: Apple TV+

Everybody loves an underdog. Mick Herron's Slough House books are espionage thrillers with a twist, focusing on the rejects, outcasts and misfits of her majesty's intelligence service - a delightful proposition that translates perfectly to this Apple series. Gary Oldman steals the show as swearing, farting, washed-up spy Jackson Lamb, overseeing a gaggle of operatives in exile, including the recently demoted and shamed River Cartwright ( Jack Lowden). Delightfully, we were blessed with not one but two seasons of the show this year, the first - a taut conspiracy involving a kidnapping, extremists and weaponising public opinion - landing in April, and the second - involving sleeper agents, unsung heroes, and an undercover trip to the Cotswolds - hitting Apple TV+ earlier this month. Both stories were gripping from start to finish, but the real delight here is the character-work. Lamb's team of fuck-ups are lovable losers one and all, but it's Oldman that dominates, his scenes spent trading barbs with Kristin Scott Thomas ' icy intelligence chief being pure, profanity-laden art. Funny, surprising and occasionally touching, Slow Horses' setup may position it as Poundland Le Carré, but the execution is anything but.

Read the Empire review of Slow Horses Season 1.

Read the Empire review of Slow Horses Season 2.

Streaming on: All 4

Jack Rooke's bittersweet show, moulded on his own experiences of grief and growing up gay, is a masterful exercise in blending heart and humour. The series begins with Jack (played by Derry Girls ' Dylan Llewellyn) mourning the loss of his dad to cancer, leaving him and his mum (Camille Coduri, an utter delight) to look after each other. After Jack eventually peels himself out of his depressive cocoon and starts university, he meets Danny (Jon Pointing), who is masking his own problems with a party-hungry fresher's exterior. Rooke's strengths lie in his detailed and tender writing, full of nuance and familiarity that will strike a chord with anyone, but especially those who relish a Harvester salad bar. A kind-hearted, self-deprecating and hilarious coming-of-age treat.

Everyone's favourite hitman returns. The third season of Bill Hader's blackest-of-comedies saw the soldier-turned-assassin-turned-wannabe-actor hit all kinds of rock bottoms, as he continues to avoid taking accountability for his actions. Now that his father figure and former acting coach Gene Cousineau (an impeccable Henry Winkler) knows his secret, Barry is forced to go to even greater lengths to keep it hidden, drawing the wrath of old manager Fuches (Stephen Root) and alienating girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who is in the midst of showrunning her own series, in the process. Every element is taken to the next level - the comedy is more hilariously blunt and surreal, the action more elaborate and suspenseful, and the dark moments? Hoo boy, they are darker than ever. With this season, Hader solidifies his talents as a director - making the fact he's confirmed to be helming every episode of the fourth season all the more exciting.

Streaming on: All 4

Expectations were always going to be high for the third and final season of Lisa McGee's superlative schoolgirl comedy - thankfully, the show managed to stick the landing, delivering another hilarious, emotional run of episodes, plus an excellent hour-long special finale. The girls were up to all their usual shenanigans - breaking into the school on the eve of GCSE results day, an anarchic train ride to the Portrush amusement park, trying to secure tickets to a Fatboy Slim gig - but this series also gave us some surprises. That Liam Neeson cameo, for one, plus a shock death, and an episode set almost entirely in 1977 that lets us see the previous generation of Derry girls at the school disco. That final episode wrapped up our journey with Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Orla (Louisa Harland), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell) and wee English fella James (Dylan Llewellyn) perfectly, as they and Norn Iron itself moved on to pastures new.

Streaming on: Apple TV+

Another Apple TV+ banger, this enveloping, timey-wimey serial killer thriller really delivers. Adapted from the Lauren Beukes novel by Silka Luisa, it stars a typically outstanding Elisabeth Moss as newspaper archivist Kirby, who still carries the scars (both literal and figurative) from being violently attacked some years before. With the help of journalist Dan (Wagner Moura) she begins an investigation to track down her assailant, hindered by the fact that neither he, nor she, nor the fabric of reality itself, appears firmly anchored in time. Far from a straight up re-telling, Luisa's adaptation tamps down some of the novel's more formulaic aspects, while dialing up the weird, leaning into the inconstancy of Kirby's reality in a way that's both effective and highly unsettling. Moss, meanwhile adds another role to her collection of traumatised women, proving definitively that no one can encapsulate that cocktail of bone-deep pain, steely defiance and barely-restrained fury quite as effectively as she can.

Read the Empire review of Shining Girls.

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Streaming on: BBC iPlayer There are an abundance of emergency service dramas on our televisions at any one time, but few are quite as impactful as The Responder, BBC's five-part series following Martin Freeman's Chris Carson, a police officer pushed closer and closer to the edge every day by the soul-sapping situations he has to deal with.

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Listen to an episode of the Empire Film Podcast

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Listen to an episode of the Empire Film Podcast

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If you'd like to have the Empire team in your ears on a regular basis (and who wouldn't?) then why not subscribe to one of their three award-winning podcasts all about Film?

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If you'd like to have the Empire team in your ears on a regular basis (and who... - Empire

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Empire's intro to 'Star Wars: The Bad Batch'

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Empire's intro to 'Star Wars: The Bad Batch'

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The expansion of the Star Wars animated small screen universe continued successfully back in 2021 with the first season of The Bad Batch. And now Season 2 – a little later than originally planned — is finally on the way next month. Find the latest trailer lurking below…

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Months have passed since the events on Kamino and the Bad Batch continue their journey navigating the Empire after the fall of the Republic. They will cross paths with friends and foes, both new and familiar, as they take on a variety of thrilling mercenary missions that will take them to unexpected and dangerous new places.

Which translates to a lot of action, the return of a certain saber-wielding young Wookiee and more trouble from Emperor Palpatine and Imperial forces.

Dee Bradley Baker is back as the voice of the Bad Batch with Michelle Ang once more playing as Omega. Rhea Perlman once more guest stars as Cid, while Noshir Dalal will again voice Vice Admiral Rampart and Wanda Sykes debuts in the series as Phee Genoa.

With 16 episodes once again, Season 2 will kick off on Disney+ on 4 January.

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Star Wars: The Bad Batch - Peace Was Never An Option In The New Trailer For Season 2

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Months have passed since the events on Kamino and the Bad Batch continue their journey navigating the Empire after the fall of the Republic. They will cross paths with friends and foes, both new and familiar, as they take on a variety of thrilling mercenary missions that will take them to unexpected and dangerous new places.

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When the electrical flora that fuels the land of Avalonia suddenly starts powering down, scientist Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) ventures to a monster-crawling subterranean world to discover the cause and put it right, with his son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) and wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) in tow.

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The Clade family head to a monster-strewn realm in Disney’s sci-fi adventure. Read the Empire review.