Ari Mattes
Ari Mattes writes about cinema and entertainment for The Conversation, concentrating on film festivals, awards-season ceremonies and new releases. His pieces tend to be structured around clear selections or themes, using curated lists and collaborative features to guide readers through crowded film calendars. He brings an academic perspective to mainstream screen culture, informed by his broader work on genre cinema and film aesthetics.
Film festivals and curated cinema
A core strand of Mattes’s work is festival coverage, where he uses a limited set of titles to capture the feel of a program rather than attempting a comprehensive survey. In his article on the Sydney Film Festival, he identifies five standout films from an “outstanding” edition of the event, framing the piece around those selections rather than general festival news. That format shows a preference for curation over reportage: he chooses a small group of films and treats them as representative of what matters most in the line-up.
The focus on a major festival also signals that he follows the yearly rhythm of theatrical cinema, tracking how new work is introduced to audiences in a programmed context.
Awards-season coverage and Oscars analysis
Mattes contributes to The Conversation’s awards-season coverage through multi-expert features on the Oscars. In the 2024 Oscars round-up, he appears alongside other specialists in a five-expert piece that breaks down Oppenheimer’s success, notable on-stage performances and the ceremony’s visual spectacle. Earlier coverage of the 2021 Oscars uses a similar format, with experts dissecting the wins, speeches, fashion choices and the significance of a strong year for women in key categories. His role in these features is to offer focused commentary within a shared frame, adding context about individual films and performances rather than simply listing winners. This kind of contribution positions him as a regular voice on awards culture, attentive to how blockbuster recognition intersects with broader trends in filmmaking and representation.
Streaming guides and contemporary releases
Beyond festivals and awards shows, Mattes takes part in streaming-focused coverage that helps audiences navigate digital platforms.
In a December streaming feature highlighting “classic Aussie cinema and new twists on old classics,” he is part of a collaborative set of picks that points readers to notable titles available across services. The piece treats streaming menus as another form of programming, drawing attention to reworked material such as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, reorganised into the series Faraway Downs with new scenes, artwork and an alternate ending. By foregrounding how films are repackaged and recontextualised for streaming, Mattes’s work in this area links distribution formats to questions of tone, narrative and reception, rather than treating online availability as a purely technical detail.
Genre cinema and screen aesthetics
Mattes’s interest in genre cinema and screen aesthetics comes through most clearly in work beyond straightforward entertainment guides. In scholarship cited in a Conversation essay on the filmic poetry of Mad Max: Fury Road, he examines the Mad Max franchise’s progression and argues that, while earlier entries revisit and critique their predecessors, Fury Road does not develop the story in the same way.
That analysis shows him engaging closely with action cinema’s visual and narrative strategies, using the series’ internal logic as a lens on broader changes in post-digital filmmaking.
Other references to his work note his affiliation with a university environment, reinforcing that his criticism grows out of sustained research rather than casual reviewing. Taken together, these threads mark him as a writer who treats genre film - blockbuster action, horror and other popular forms - as material for serious critical attention.
Across these activities, Mattes sits at the junction of academic film study and accessible entertainment writing. He moves between festival reports, awards commentary, streaming guides and genre analysis while keeping the focus on how specific films operate within their contexts: the programmed festival line-up, the Oscars stage, the streaming catalogue or a long-running franchise.
For anyone tracking coverage of contemporary cinema at The Conversation, his byline signals pieces that combine clear selections with an interest in what those selections say about the broader state of film.
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