I crunched the data on over a million shots of faces across 3,655 movies to see whether modern lighting is getting flatter.

I analysed fifteen years of Oscar nominees to see whether the most-mentioned contenders in the trades tend to go on to win.

I crunched the numbers on 8,190 movies to discover which types stay profitable even when the critics are unkind.

In previous years, I have run a deep data dive into whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and also tried to predict which will be the next controversial Christmas movie. This year, I wanted to take a ...

Films evolve in many small ways that are easy to miss if you are not looking for them. One area I had not studied before is shot composition. It is such a basic building block of visual storytelling ...

A few weeks ago, John August dropped me an email which included a simple question: "How accurate is the page-per-minute rule of thumb?" The rule John is referring to is that a film based on a ...

Colour is one of the quickest ways a poster can tell you what kind of film it’s selling. Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it ...

This article is part of my ‘Big Ideas’ series, in which I explore the evolving landscape of the film industry. Each instalment will focus on one of the key shifts highlighted below, digging deeper ...