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“Daddy’s Home 2” isn’t sorry. It doesn’t care about your stupid feelings. Don’t remember what happened at the end of the last movie, or which home belongs to which daddy? Too bad. Don’t want your festive family comedies to star Mel Gibson as a serial womanizer with a flair for violence? Well, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” isn’t out until next week, so you’re shit out of luck. Don’t understand how Will Ferrell could re-team with Mark Wahlberg when a sequel to “Step Brothers” is possibly the only thing that could pull civilization back from the brink? Get in line.

A follow-up to one of Sofia Coppola’s favorite movies of all time, “Daddy’s Home 2” literally ends with its characters snowbound in a multiplex and forced to watch some limp Hollywood garbage because they don’t have anything better to do. In a better world,...

The film industry has been around for well over 100 years. Today, Cinelinx looks at some of the famous firsts that set the foundation for the movie industry and made cinema what it is today.

As a bit of trivia to begin with, the first known piece of moving film footage was the The Horse in Motion (1878), a 3-second experiment consisting of 24 photographs shot in rapid succession. It’s just a scene of a jockey riding a horse, but it ultimately led to the development of modern film.

Most early films were short, silent bits of daily life, showing such exciting events as boarding a train, which was captured in The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895). This film footage supposedly scared the bejesus out of the viewing audience, who thought a real train was coming at them and ran for cover. Early films began to include documentary footage and newsreels,...

Cannes head will be live-narrating his archive film Lumière! at the festival.

Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) this weekend but his visit was not connected to his role as the head of the biggest and most glamorous festival in the world.

Double-hatted Frémaux was in town instead as managing director of France’s Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière and film heritage in general, which he oversees when not preparing Cannes.

He flew into Toronto do a live narration of his film Lumière! pulling together some 100 short films shot by the Lumière brothers from 1895 to 1905, which are rarely shown on the big screen today.

He spearheaded the film, producing alongside compatriot director Bertrand Tavernier (who is president of the Institut Lumière), to mark the 120th anniversary of cinema in France in 2015.

“Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly...

The following text is an excerpt from an essay commissioned by the specialist publishing house Hatori Press (Japan) for a tribute to the great critic, scholar and teacher Shigehiko Hasumi on the occasion of his 80th birthday (29 April 2016). Other contributors to this book (slated to appear in both Japanese and English editions) include Pedro Costa, Chris Fujiwara and Richard I. Suchenski. Beyond Prof. Hasumi’s many achievements in criticism and education (he was President of the University of Tokyo between 1997 and 2001), his ‘method,’ his unique way of seeing and speaking about films, has served as an immense inspiration for a generation of directors in Japan including Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama. The online magazines Rouge (www.rouge.com.au) and Lola (www.lolajournal.com), co-edited by Martin, provide the best access to Hasumi’s work in English (see references in the notes below).Leos Carax and Shigehiko Hasumi. Photo by Michiko Yoshitake.

Like us, objects and events can be photogenic–or not. Boxing matches, galloping horses, and speeding trains, for example, have proven ideal fodder for the motion-picture camera. The last of these subjects is also the oldest, going back to the pioneering Lumiere Brothers’ doc, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. It was made and first shown in 1896, the first year that film was projected. The narrative of this 50-second actualité is simple. A train pulls into the station and stops; anonymous passengers disembark with the help of people standing on the platform, a few of whom then climb aboard. […]...

Like us, objects and events can be photogenic–or not. Boxing matches, galloping horses, and speeding trains, for example, have proven ideal fodder for the motion-picture camera. The last of these subjects is also the oldest, going back to the pioneering Lumiere Brothers’ doc, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. It was made and first shown in 1896, the first year that film was projected. The narrative of this 50-second actualité is simple. A train pulls into the station and stops; anonymous passengers disembark with the help of people standing on the platform, a few of whom then climb aboard. […]...

There is a case to be made for home movies as the purest form of cinema. It’s folly, of course, to pit films against one another based on the circumstances under which they were made; to argue what is realer, and thus more valid, than the other. In a camera’s lens, especially, the lines of truth and lies blur and overlap. It’s just that in what we believe to be reality the stakes are always higher, the emotions elevated. One of the first films ever made, the Lumière brothers’ L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, was a succinct 56 seconds that depicted the arrival of a train at its station in Lyon, France. When it was first shown to the public it was the audience’s virgin film-viewing experience, and it was reported that many were frightened by the illusion that the train was coming straight for them.

Taiwan’s Hsiao-hsien Hou has often spoken of his admiration for Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. In the 1993 documentary Talking with Ozu, attached to the Criterion edition of Tokyo Story and featuring such commentators as Claire Denis and Aki Kaurismäki, he compares the man’s work to that of a mathematician: one that observes and studies in a detached, clinical fashion. Often, returning to the same themes of generational conflict within the family unit, but doing so with a profound self-confidence that only lends such reiterations more weight. Hou goes on to state that, while he considers his own “observations and insight into the human condition” to be similarly objective, he really can’t compare. Yet, the similarities are very much evident. Indeed, few batted an eyelid when Ozu’s longtime employer Shochiku, upon commissioning a project for his centenary, chose not a Japanese but Taiwanese director to best capture the spirit of his films.

Of Horses And Men won the Tridens and Fipresci prizes at Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival went out in a blaze of surreal glory on Saturday night, as the awards were handed out in a ceremony filled with slapstick asides involving some of the great and good of Estonian cinema, choral excellence and even a rendition of German heavy metal band Ramstein's Du Hast (You Hate).

Beginning with the Lumiere Brothers' famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the stage became a locomotive to take us on a journey through the prizes, which included a lifetime achievement award for Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó (Mephisto, Colonel Redl). Oh, and did I mention the man in the wolf mascot suit? The result was certainly off-kilter but the high energy of everyone involved and general quirkiness mirrored the spirit of the festival and its organisers and volunteers - enthusiastic,...

La Ciotat's Eden music hall, built in 1889, tops £5.5m refurbishment with black-and-white movie billing

When the Lumière brothers screened one of their first moving pictures – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station – at the Eden theatre at the close of the 19th century, it was said that some of those present were so shocked by the life-like images that they leapt from their seats in terror to flee the oncoming steam locomotive.

On Wednesday, more than a century on, these early black-and-white silent films lasting less than a minute were given top billing in the newly renovated Eden, which claims to be the world's first, and oldest surviving, public cinema.

The historic theatre at La Ciotat, 20 miles east of Marseille, which later played host to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, has undergone a €6.5m (£5.5m) refurbishment that has more than restored its former glory.

Before Hollywood became the...

Last Friday evening, I finally started watching Mark Cousins’ much-discussed, often-derided, but undeniably-important The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a 15-part, 915-minute examination of the history of the medium. Covering the first two decades of cinema’s development, he naturally touches on D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, a film that was shown this past weekend here in Los Angeles in a new digital restoration, a few blocks from my apartment, where I also could have watched the film from the same service – Netflix – through which I was watching The Story of Film. Nearly one hundred years ago, Griffith shot the film’s famous Babylon set at the intersection of Sunset, Hollywood, and Hillhurst, in a part of town now known as Silver Lake, and where our great Vista Theatre now operates. The location is well known because the set stood standing as a local attraction until 1919. It later provided the basis...

L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat) is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent film directed and produced by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. Filmed in one continuous shot, this fifty-second film is considered to be one of the very first films shown to a paying audience.

The film featured a train entering the frame, pulling into a station, and then leaving the frame. While shot with a static camera, the film illustrated the use of the long shot to establish setting, followed by a medium shot, then close up. A popular story among cinephiles is that when this film was screened for the first time, audiences were so unaccustomed to such realistic moving images, that they fled the room in terror believing the train was going to burst through the screen and run over them. While this seems a bit questionable,...

Today Columbia Pictures went all out with The Amazing Spider-Man previewing footage from the upcoming July release across several cities as well as debuting the brand new 3D trailer. As with all things fanboy related it is receiving plenty of praise from all corners, but the one comment that has already hit me comes from The Playlist's Drew Taylor who opens his comments on the footage saying "visually the movie appears to be absolutely ravishing -- deep and immersive in ways most 3D movies lack." What does that mean? How is it more immersive? How can something that does not surround you in any way become immersive? We have been discussing 3-D on the podcast recently (particularly this episode here) and asking what does it mean to have good 3-D? I know lately everyone has been slobbering Martin Scorsese's Hugo and it's so-called incredible 3-D. I saw nothing with...

Atari was an important architect of the rise of videogame culture in America, creating the first home-console boom and bust years before the original Nes even arrived on our shores. Unfortunately, Atari has also been inessential for nearly three decades now — a brand name handed from investor to investor, like a sad little baton in a retirement home relay race. So it’s not surprising that, in an interview with CNN, new CEO Jim Wilson talks a lot about getting Atari back to the good old days. “We’re looking at different ways to reinterpret or reinvent our classic franchises...

As Hugo aims to enchant audiences with a 3D story about the birth of cinema, Mark wonders whether 3D’s improving, and exactly what it adds to our experience…

Please note: there's a slight spoiler for Joe Dante's The Hole a bit further down. It's clearly marked.

Last week saw the UK release of Hugo, and if you weren't expecting a 3D family film from Martin Scorsese, you might be even more surprised to hear that his film boasts the most adept use of Real-D 3D since the resurgence of stereoscopy in the cinema.

Hugo, which is possessed with a love of early cinema that is as accessible for young children as it is for hardened film buffs, actually finds a thematic use for 3D. It directly recalls the first audience who saw the Lumière brothers' Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat. They reportedly ran away from the screen,...

Most people do not think that they like silent movies. That’s understandable. In the 84 years since The Jazz Singer started singing, whole generations of humanity have been born, have grown to maturity, have conquered the world, and have died. Very few of us have any living family members who remember the silent era. Heck, very few of us have any living family members who can remember a time when the phrase “sound film” actually made sense. (What films don’t have sound?) Like classical music or American literature before Huckleberry Finn, there is something just so boring, so unsexy,...

"Of all the cinematic surprises of 2011 — the ascendency of Elizabeth Olsen, the excellence of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Woody Allen's return as hit-maker — the renaissance of silent cinema was probably the hardest to see coming down the pike," writes Tom Shone in Slate. "After it received a 15-minute standing ovation, Michel Hazanavicius's homage to the days of swashbuckling matinee idols, iris shots, and Busby Berkeley dance numbers, The Artist, was marked up by Oscarologists as the outside favorite to win best picture." And of course, this same holiday weekend has seen the opening of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, "whose poster echoes Harold Lloyd's clock shenanigans in Safety Last (1923) and whose final 25 minutes turn into a loving revivification of the earliest days of cinema, from George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon to the Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat… Nobody could accuse modern blockbusters of silence,...

"Martin Scorsese's Hugo begins with a vertiginous descent that only gains speed as it follows a train and barrels into the station that will be its main setting," writes Phil Coldiron in Slant. "Leaving the tracks, it continues on its path through the concourse, moving past digital extras, the first of many ghostly presences, before seamlessly entering the realm of the real — that is, the soundstage. The worlds of Lumière (the train: the document of reality) and Méliès (the impossible camera: the spectacle of fantasy) come together, the latter used as a tool to try to restore the long-lost thrill of the former. This is the first moment of Scorsese's career that could accurately be described as Cameronian; it's also the first appearance of Hugo's exceptionally personal cinematic gambit."

"Like nearly all of Scorsese's films, Hugo can be taken as personal allegory," agrees Adam Cook. "It can also...

Before we get further, this article was made for both diehard film fanatics and those just discovering the wonder of early cinema. If you fall into the former category, I suggest bookmarking this and returning after you see Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo. The director has included endless nods to the films that made him who he is and it is a joy to see their inclusion in his adventure film.

If you fall into the latter category, get caught up with my rundown of the classic films most prominently featured in his magical ode to the beginnings of the medium. Check them all out below where they are also free to stream in their entirety, unless otherwise noted.

Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor; 1923)

Not only is the homage directly on the theatrical poster and in the actual film, but our lead characters go see this silent classic featuring...

Director Martin Scorsese brings us his latest film, an unexpected foray into family-friendly 3D. Here’s Ryan’s review of Hugo…

On the surface, Hugo seems like an odd career move for director Martin Scorsese, who’s perhaps better known for his violent, sweary dramas, gangster flicks or music documentaries.

Based on Brian Selznick’s novel, The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, Hugo is a lavish, star-laden fantastical drama starring Asa Butterfield as the young hero of the title, Chloë Grace Moretz as his friend Isabelle, while Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Ray Winstone and Sir Ben Kingsley round out the adult cast.

The story is nominally about young orphan Hugo, who lives in the catacombs of a Paris railway station in the 1930s. Determined to repair a strange mechanical figure found by his father shortly before he died, Hugo sets out to discover the automaton’s hidden connection to grumpy,...

The first in a series of articles in which I select my favourite horror movie from each of the last ten decades, providing some context and history and a look at (some) of the other great horrors of each. It is in no way meant to be a comprehensive history. Some articles are expanded upon from a list I wrote last year.

Few filmmakers in the first two decades of movie-making seemed explicitly interested in frightening the audience, though perhaps the audience soon let the filmmakers know what it craved. There is the famous story of the first screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896), directed by the Lumière brothers, with reports of fleeing, terrified audience members as a train approached the screen. That this never actually happened is almost irrelevant; there is a reason some apocryphal tales persist.

One of the most often adapted horror texts of all time,...

Note: Hugo was screened at the New York Film Festival as a work-in-progress with color correction, sound mixing, titles, 3D and visual effects not fully complete. Check out my detailed impressions below, but look for a full review on the final film when it releases next month.

Being a film lover and director go hand in hand, but it is difficult to find a more passionate, well-educated cinema historian than Martin Scorsese. The director of classics such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull has a seemingly endless knowledge of the medium, frequently noting the influence that filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Italian neo-realist pieces such as The Bicycle Thieves have had on him. One can see the profound effect in his filmmaking, with such a firm control on and expertise in the medium coming through his frames. By presiding over a film preservation foundation, the auteur also hopes the profound...

Robert (author of Distant Relatives) here. If you, like me, have been wondering how the phrases "Martin Scorsese" and "family-friendly holiday season event film" could possibly fit together ever since the announcement of The Invention of Hugo Cabret...

...later shortened to Hugo Cabret, later shortened to Hugo (by the time the film hits theaters in November it may just be H.) the newly released trailer may answer your questions, though not necessarily satisfactorily, and may leave you with all new ones. Let's discuss.

The name Martin Scorsese was, is, and will continue to be the selling point behind this film, at least for cinephiles who consider each new Scorsese film an event. But the trailer here has definitely been cut for the kind of mass audience that doesn't flock to Scorsese in droves. If you're looking for something non-threatening enough for the kids, but well crafted enough for adults, this trailer is targeting you.

From the pioneers of the silver screen to today's new realism, French directors have shaped film-making around the world

France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole concept of cinema. Film historians call The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the 50-second film by the Lumière brothers first screened in 1895, the birth of the medium.

But the best-known early pioneer, who made films with some kind of cherishable narrative value, was Georges Méliès, whose 1902 short A Trip to the Moon is generally heralded as the first science-fiction film, and a landmark in cinematic special effects. Meanwhile, Alice Guy-Blaché, Léon Gaumont's one-time secretary, is largely forgotten now, but with films such as L'enfant de la barricade trails the status of being the first female film-maker.

The towering achievement of French cinema in the silent era was undoubtedly Abel Gance's six-hour biopic of Napoleon (1927), which...

Did they really panic? It's one of the best-known stories about early cinema. The audience members at the first screening of the Lumière brothers' The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in early 1896 were so terrified at the sight of a steam train rumbling toward them on the big screen that they were thrown into convulsions of terror. Whether it's true or not, it's one of the defining moments in early cinema history. Ever since, movies about trains – especially runaway trains – have been made at regular intervals.

Films and trains: they go way back. Take the Lumière brothers' pioneering their new cinématographe invention in 1895 with “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” or 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery,” widely considered to be the foundation for all narrative cinema; it seems that back then, anyone holding a movie camera could think of nothing better to do with it than point it at a train. The two were, of course, born of similar mechanical, pre-electronic technology; cogs and spokes and sprockets keep a locomotive on its tracks, even as their tinier counterparts spool celluloid through a projector. It’s…...

HollywoodNews.com: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present some of the earliest examples of three-dimensional motion pictures in a new “3D Rarities: From 1900 and Beyond” event.

It’s a common motion picture legend that the Lumière brothers’ early film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” (1896) had audiences fleeing from their chairs as the train approached the station, threatening to run directly off the screen into the auditorium. However, few know that the Lumière brothers reshot the arrival of a train in 3D and organized a technically improved screening of that footage and other 3D shorts in 1935.

Bromberg, who is based in Paris, will present a look back at the origins of 3D, including the first efforts by the Lumière brothers and other rarities from Georges Méliès, Norman McLaren, Charley Bowers and the Disney Studios, in the 3D edition of his “Retour de Flamme (Saved from the Flames)” show.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the man who gave us the likes of "Goodfellas" and "Taxi Driver," is following up "Shutter Island," his latest, with something for the whole family. "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," by Brian Selznick, is a 2008 Caldecott Medal winning historical-fiction tale of the titular young boy who lives in a Paris train station. The story is said to be inspired by formative French filmmaker Georges Méliès, a man who developed many of cinema's earliest special effects and camera tricks, as well as one of the early artists to twist the medium for the purposes of storytelling.

It seems that the production is kicking into high gear, as a number of high-profile players appear to be in the process of signing on to join Scorsese in his latest adventure. Deadline Hollywood reports (unsourced) that a sizable group of...

This being the week of the Oscars, Hollywood's annual celebration of film and film-watching, Pinkos turns the spotlight on the best clips on the communal magic of moviegoing

We all have our own little ritual, our own private ceremony, when we go the cinema. Some always head for that regular aisle seat on the left, others give musty toes a clandestine airing, yet more still will succumb to the lure of the corn that pops.

Only then can we slip easily into the cosy, velvety chairs (well, in some cases …) and let the magic of the light on screen entrance us. This week, Oscars week, all eyes are turned to the people watching in the auditorium. So, in celebration of our turn in the limelight, and with due genuflection to Chacun son Cinéma, that great portmanteau movie celebrating cinemagoing, I present my five top clips showing filmgoing rites in different lights.

Of the many crimes foisted upon humanity by the faceless filmmaking syndicate known as Hollywood, perhaps none are as loathsome as the subpar remake. A practice that hearkens back to the dawn of cinema (little known fact: the Lumière Bros.' 1898 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was actually a remake of the far superior train-arriving-at-a-station movie Tout Abord le Choo Choo! from twenty years prior), it seems that the 21st Century has brought something of a Golden Era for truly craptastic, reconfigured cinematic entertainments. After the jump, we run through 11 of the best worst Hollywood remakes, and invite you to add your own in the comments.