Winner of 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture, The Artist is an awe-inspiring ode to the silent era of cinema and is filmed with such fine elegance & precision artistry that it was too difficult for me to wipe the grin off my face while watching it. An enthralling work of indelible charm, every frame of this silent feature pays its tribute in the most respectful manner possible but also succeeds in carving out its very own identity in the process.

Set in Hollywood during the years when talkies were being introduced into cinema, The Artist focuses on the relationship between a major silent film star & an aspiring young actress who bump into each other during the premiere of the former's…

Boy, was I disappointed.

I was looking forward to this film, of course fuelled by the hype surrounding it, the Oscar nominations it got and the prizes it had already won. For me it was merely a gimmicky, thinly stretched exercise in style.

Now don't get me wrong, I really appreciate what they were trying to do here. Anyone who wants to make an ode to cinema has got my vote and I applaud them for that. I just feel by wrapping it all in a flimsy, incredibly shallow plot they caused me to lose interest.

Dujardin's performance has been praised a lot, but I found him to be very one-dimensional. Sure he has got incredible charm and an unmistakable…

I was grinning like an idiot the entire time I was watching this film. Hard to pinpoint what exactly makes it so effortlessly endearing – I mean, there are many things – the slapstick is great, the music's lovely, the dog is adorable, the whole movie is just an energetic whirlwind of visual witticisms and delightful touches. But I think the real goodness comes from how confidently it flirts with the boundary between authenticity and kitsch... every scene is so well-rendered in the language of camp and irony that it makes the moments of cold, stark drama all the more horrific and powerful.

There is so much meta-commentary here on the magic of film – the way we surrender ourselves…

In the past couple of years we have had a number of films look back to fertile periods of cinema’s history; from Scorsese’s love letter to the pioneering greats in Hugo to the Spielbergian fan-fiction of Abrams’, Super 8. Whilst both were undoubtedly affectionate towards those movies that inspired them the end results were rather lifeless and never quite recaptured the true brilliance of the film’s that initially influenced them. Despite the plethora of awards I was fully expecting The Artist to be another handsomely made but hollow facsimile of past greats, but on this occasion it pleases me to be very wrong indeed.

The Artist ended up being not only a loving homage to the silent era of Hollywood…

I'm torn. In many ways, The Artist merely feels pretentious and inane. Why make a silent film about the death of silent films, about the virtues of talking pictures? Why, furthermore, hash out a version of Singin' In The Rain that ultimately only wishes it could be Singin' In The Rain? Lastly, why make this look like a silent film when the cinematic language used is primarily that of a classical, 40s Hollywood film? More questions could be asked, but I will not dwell on them. This is a somewhat fun picture. The melodramatic Hollywood dream of a narrative feels out-dated and far too naive, however. This leaves everything feeling ever so cheap, but this has its moments of sincerity…