Author Brian McFarlane

Feature image: Jill Esmond with Laurence Olivier When I was eleven, an Australian schoolboy already besotted with the movies, I saw a film called My Pal Wolf (1944) at a kids’ holiday matinee in rural Victoria...

It needs real nerve to come out of a film based on a famous novel and declare unreservedly that you enjoyed the film much more than the book. I mean, books came first. Literature, as a study, preceded film by d...

It’s not as though there was nothing else going on in Australian cinema in the 1970s, but the combination of period piece, eye-catching locations, literary adaptation and coming-of-age theme surely conjures up ...

There is always a degree of libidinal investment in our appreciation of screen icons. No doubt it has McFarlane in its sway in his contemplative piece on the career and singular charisma of Merle Oberon.

If you take a piece of paper and cut off half of the image of Graeme Blundell on the cover of this book and then inspect the left-hand side, you will get what seems to be the knowing, winking Aussie bloke o...

“Not a patch on the old film” is likely to be the common response to most remakes, perhaps without too much thought going into the opinion. Or into what constitutes a film “remake”. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998)...