Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to his 2010 head turner Blue Valentine has guns, shoot-outs and Ryan Gosling — but it’s also a daring and unconventional work. There was plenty to talk about.

Marlon Wayans isn’t known for critically acclaimed work. But comedy is subjective and sometimes — as he says of the critical populace — “you guys have got a thumb up your ass.”

Jeff Orlowski’s Oscar-nominated climate change documentary Chasing Ice reveals the delicate craft of measuring global warming on glacial ice. It’s no easy job — and neither is making a film about it.

Has Tropfest got too big for its own good? I speak to organiser John Polson after another wildly successful event in Sydney – which some filmmakers refuse to enter.

He’s Hollywood’s go-to guy for a mean looking Mexican. Veteran actor Danny Trejo has been in more films and TV shows than even he can count — and his fascinating real-life story is every bit as intense as the kind of characters he portrays.

Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables has received a mixed response from critics. I talked to him about the mammoth task of bringing Les Mis to the big screen.

Both myself and my three-year-old niece love Finding Nemo and Toy Story. Does having an impact on a person’s formative years feel daunting for a filmmaker? I speak to director Lee Unkrich about this, the colossal influence of Pixar Studios and more.

I assumed acclaimed filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson would be happy to discuss correlations between his new film, The Master, and the Scientology movement on which it was partly based. I was wrong.

Benicio Del Toro’s road to success has not been a conventional one. The Oscar-winning actor spoke to me about making it in Hollywood, his new film Savages, the legacy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and being a bad-ass Puerto Rican.

The producer claims they had an agreement. The star, Chopper Read, calls bullshit. Both speak to me about the bizarre launch of new Australian film The Hurtin’ Kind Part One: The Albanian.

Director Lynn’s Shelton’s love-triangle-with-a-twist dramedy Your Sister’s Sister (which opens in select cinemas nationwide this week) is the best kind of micro budget American indie: a thoughtful, engaging, and, in its own unprepossessing way, daring feature built on strong performances and interesting characters. After making a scene at a memorial party for his late brother [...]

Charlie Casanova is not a film you watch and forget. Irish writer/director Terry McMahon’s grungy hard-hitting character portrait follows a self-obsessed sociopath named Charlie (Emmett J. Scanlan) who runs over a woman with his car and decides, Two Face style, to draw a card to determine whether he calls the police. His business is struggling, [...]

In 1975 a team of guerrilla filmmakers came together to make Pure Shit, a searing portrait of heroin addicts in Melbourne. All these years later it remains the most vivid and rawest depiction of drug abuse the Australian film industry has yet produced (I have written previously about the remarkable circumstances surrounding the film, particularly how [...]

A Royal Affair is writer/director Nikolaj Arcel’s sumptuously shot love triangle drama set in 18th century Denmark. The story, full of political powerplays and back room machinations, focuses on a Danish queen, her insane king and a German doctor. Based on real events and partly adapted from a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth, Queen Caroline Mathilde [...]

It’s not every day you get to watch a movie about Nazis from the dark side of the moon who come down to invade Earth, and certainly not every day you get to speak to the filmmaker who made it happen. Iron Sky (currently playing in Australian cinemas) aka the ‘Nazis from the moon movie’ [...]

Shortly after the release of the acclaimed Oscar-winning Days of Heaven in 1978 its director, Terence Malick, whose previous film Badlands was equally respected by critics, moved to Paris and disappeared from public view. He returned to the chair 20 years later to make the star-studded The Thin Red Line.  It is always a curious occurrence when [...]