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Down Under.

Abe Forsythe will talk the two masks of drama - comedy and tragedy - this Friday as part of Aftrs' Friday on My Mind talks series. The Down Under writer-drector will chat with host Giles Hardie in Sydney to analyse the awful things we laugh at, and possibly have a chuckle at the missteps he.s made in his career as a filmmaker. Forsythe has surfed the line between comedy and tragedy for years, winning Tropfest in 2010 with his short film Shock, showing the depression behind the scenes of breakfast radio, while his black comedy.feature Down Under premiered at.Sff and will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival, kicking off tomorrow. Forsythe won the Tropfest Tropicana Award at the age of sixteen for his film Guided By The Light Of The Lord. In 2003 he wrote, directed and starred in the feature comedy Ned, which was released...

Pre-eminent drama producer John Edwards will deliver the Hector Crawford memorial lecture next Wednesday at the Screen Forever conference in Melbourne.

Edwards' productions have won 39 AFI and Aacta Awards, four People.s Choice Awards, eight Astra Awards, 29 Logies, more than a dozen craft awards in Australia and international accolades including three New York Festival Awards and a Golden Globe nomination.

Now with Endemol Shine Australia, he has produced more than 600 hours of television drama including The Beautiful Lie, Offspring, Gallipoli, Love My Way, Paper Giants, The Secret Life of Us and Police Rescue.

Among his other credits are The Surgeon, Dangerous, Rush, Tangle, Puberty Blues, Party Tricks, the Golden Globe nominated mini-series On the Beach, Marking Time, which won seven AFI Awards, six telemovies in the Cody series, and Beaconsfield.

Screen Producers Australia CEO Matt Deaner said, .Edwards. contribution to Australian television drama is incomparable to any other contemporary figure in the country.

In many ways this was always going to be a ‘Marking Time’ summer. The hoopla of debuting blockbusters was constantly being eclipsed by breaking news about the big summer movies of 2015/16. With photos and plot details being drip-fed all summer from the sets of Star Wars: Episode VII, Avengers: Age of Ulton and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, it took a bit of effort to get genuinely excited about the upcoming fourth Transformers movie.

There was an orderly, uncontroversial tone to the summer line-up this year; everybody behaved as predicted. There were no Lone Rangers or John Carters; no Battleship-level disasters. The biggest disappointments of the season were probably Seth MacFarlane’s Ted follow-up, A Million Ways to Die in The West and the entirely unwanted Expendables 3 (which scraped back $27m; barely enough to cover the cod liver oil and Sanatogen allowance for the cast).

Instead, the malaise was...

Sundance just ended, and we are already preparing for the next big film festival, South By Southwest. Not too long ago, the festival announced a few of the films premiering this year, but now they’ve announced the main slate. The midnight selections and some inevitable late-breaking additions are still to be announced, but this should be more than enough to get you excited. Along with many World Premieres, and Sundance favorites like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Gareth Evans’ The Raid 2, the line up also includes an anniversary screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and an extended Q&A screening of The Grand Budapest Hotel with Wes Anderson. SXSW 2014 runs March 7 through 15 in Austin, Texas. Check out the line up after the jump.

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Narrative Feature Competition

Eight world premieres, eight unique ways to celebrate the art of storytelling. Selected from 1,324 films submitted to SXSW 2014. Films screening in Narrative...

Today the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival announced a diverse features lineup for this year’s Festival, the 21st edition and running March 7 – 15, 2014 in Austin, Texas. The 2014 program expands on SXSW tradition of embracing a range of genres and span of budgets, featuring a wealth of vision from experienced and developing filmmakers alike.

For more information visit http://sxsw.com/film.

Listed in the announcement are 115 of the features that will screen over the course of nine days at SXSW 2014. The lineup below includes 68 films from first-time filmmakers, and consists of 76 World Premieres, 10 North American Premieres and 7 U.S. Premieres. These films were selected from a record 2,215 feature-length film submissions composed of 1,540 U.S. and 675 international feature-length films. With a record number of 6,482 submissions total, the overall increase was 14% over 2013. The Midnighters feature section and the Short Film program will be announced on February 5, with the complete...

After announcing earlier this month that Jon Favreau’s Chef and the Veronica Mars movie will be making their world debuts at SXSW this year, the festival has revealed its full line-up, including further very promising world premieres, alongside appearances from some of the year’s most high-profile films.

The Midnight programme will be announced early next month, along with the Shorts line-up, and the complete Conference slate a little later as well.

Led by Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, Nicholas Stoller’s anticipated R-rated comedy, Neighbors, will be making its world debut at the festival, notably marked out as a ‘work-in-progress’ ahead of its theatrical release in May.

David Gordon Green’s acclaimed Joe will make its Us premiere, having bowed at Venice and then Toronto last year. Early reviews have Nicolas Cage giving one of the finest performances of his career, with Tye Sheridan (Mud) excellent alongside him.

Not sure if there is a Short Term 12 equivalent in this year’s Narrative Feature Comp, but on paper SXSW programmers are serving up a mean (and the usual lean group of 8 out of a whopping 1,324 film entries) for the upcoming competitiuon of eight which includes notable entries (that we’ve been tracking for a good time now) such as Zachary Wigon’s The Heart Machine, John Magary’s The Mend, Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe in Unicorns and Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries. Undoubtedly one of the most anticipated docs of the year, on the non-fiction side we find Margaret Brown’s The Great Invisible. Below you’ll find a breakdown of the other sections (notable world preems in We’ll Never Have Paris and Faults (see Mary Elizabeth Winstead above), some Sundance items with Texan connections and other nuggets.

Narrative Feature Competition

Eight world premieres, eight...

Okay, so here's a plot premise: Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff) -- erstwhile New Directions nemesis and the guy responsible for, as Kurt (Chris Colfer) put it, making breakfast on Rachel's (Lea Michele's) head -- opens a glee club consulting business. His first clients? New Directions. He's ostensibly here to help but, hey, the guy can't help himself: he's a jerk and his very presence throws the Glee club into disarray.

Sure,  Rachel is utterly self-involved and willing to believe anyone who heaps praise on her (admittedly awesome) voice, but the rest of us aren't quite so naive. And that's just one reason why Tuesday's (May 17) "Glee" has us less than glee-ful as we head into the May 24 season finale. Here are five others:

1. Sue Sylvester's (Jane Lynch) sister is dead. Could this episode be a bigger buzz kill? We don't like liking Sue, but who can help it...