I guess I might be able to find a few people out there who feel like me. And I hope they’ll agree with me that it’s not just laziness at play here; that it’s out of a deep fascination for this craft, a swooning desire for the art of cinema. Filling our senses in a way no other art form can hope to. And it’s a communal art, which is a bonus.

A Separation is a realistic movie that might be expected to make us think of life and shake us up, while something like Scorsese’s Hugo, a fantasy — a richly entertaining 3D fantasy — is as far away from true life as we can get, and yet they both fill our senses and touch us deeply. In different ways, yes, but both, a story about a boy’s adventure in a Parisian train station and an intimate, complex moral drama of two families in modern Tehran become in our hearts, in our imagination, one indelible emotional, aesthetic experience. It’s not the high level of realism in one and the delirious sense of fantasy in the other that get at us, but their art — cinematic art. Today I’d like to invite you to immerse yourself in the movies you want to watch—not by just passively consuming the story, but by fully living and experiencing it. Read My Lips", a 1993 episode of Batman: The Animated Series, features a villain called the Ventriloquist, who leads a group of criminals through the persona of his dummy Scarface.When I asked Pico Iyer, a writer with a deep respect and reverence for cinema, what he felt about literature’s relationship to movies, he said: “It’s no surprise to me that those writers who hold us most are often the ones — I think of Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro — who have clearly learned from the leanness and wordlessness of movies. Movies have given us a new way to lose ourselves, and our artists a new, crafty, universal and post-verbal way to tell a story.” Yes, yes, yes — exactly. Pico’s eloquence comes to my rescue: these are the very things I have perhaps been fumbling to say about what movies do for us. Méliès wrote, directed, produced, distributed, built the sets for and performed in his films himself. Despite this artisanal mode of production, his was for a time France's leading film studio. Only on the eve of the first world war was he driven out of business by better capitalised corporations like Pathé – an economic lesson fudged in Hugo, which ascribes Méliès's business failure to the war itself. He was rediscovered in the 1930s operating a candy store in the Montparnasse railway station – belatedly decorated by the French government and lionised by cinephiles and Surrealists. Joanna Lumley and her husband Stephen Barlow invite you into their home for a fascinating, funny journey into their shared love of music. The lead character is Bo Wolfe played by Jacob Latimore. It’s actually quite a good film and maybe one that has passed you by. It certainly doesn’t have the star power of The Prestige or The Illusionist, but there’s loads of good cardistry (basically, sleight of had with cards). You probably know Joanna Lumley, but you may not be aware that her husband Stephen Barlow is a famed conductor, composer and musician - and the pair of them are passionate about classical music. On this, their new podcast, the pair welcome you into their home for a personal, fascinating and funny journey through a musical world.

Movies tell the stories of our times. They define the landmarks of generation after generation. They document our prejudices and where we went wrong. Or they can spark debate and be the voice of change. I list below some of the things I’ve done to enjoy the experience and engage with the story and the team behind such a magical creation. The whole world knows going to the cinema is our national pastime. And that Hollywood hasn’t been able to dent our box-office or our tastes because of the kind of emotional grip our own cinema’s aesthetic has had — and will continue to have — on our imagination and our purses. We know too that the pan Indian Hindi movie is a myth, and that its hold on us is only a small part (too deracinated to take hold, really) of the larger, deeper seduction of South Indian movies which is far more vibrant and rooted than Bollywood. (And now we are hearing of wonderful things happening in the new Marathi cinema). It’s true that movies were even more of an obsession with us before the multiplex, but even so, most weekday evening shows and all weekend shows today still go houseful. Siskel, Gene (November 13, 1978). "Hopkins' stellar 'Magic' act weaves a spell". Chicago Tribune. Section 3, p. 6 . Retrieved September 29, 2022– via Newspapers.com. If you’re looking for magicians in movies, Magicians probably has more than any other film. Magicians is a British film, largely based around magic and magic conventions in the UK. The leads are from the UK sitcom, The Peep Show. David Mitchell and Robert Webb play magicians Karl and Henry who want to take part in a magic competition.Brakhage saw Méliès as his precursor, "the first man to recognise motion pictures as medium of both super-nature and under-world". Scorsese has said that, for him, the most enjoyable aspect of Hugo was the opportunity that it gave him to be Méliès, reconstructing Méliès's glass studio and recreating the underwater set of his 1903 Fairyland: Kingdom of the Fairies.