Luke Buckmaster
Luke Buckmaster is a film and television critic for the Guardian, known for vivid, narrative-driven reviews that focus on genre cinema, Australian screen culture and ambitious storytelling on screen.
Film reviews and new releases
His core work is reviewing contemporary films for the Guardian, with a particular interest in structurally playful and tonally distinctive titles. In his review of The Killings at Parrish Station he frames the film as a whacked-out murder mystery packed with twists, underlining his focus on plotting, rhythm and the way genre machinery drives audience engagement.[anchor] He habitually uses precise, energetic language to capture atmosphere and pacing, describing one film as a “weird, dazzling, kinetic, dizzyingly ambitious, sensationally mishmashed beast” and another as a “droll, dry and mordantly amusing comedy-drama that exists in a Twilight Zone-esque world impossible to gauge or define.”
His pieces typically balance close attention to performance and directorial choices with clear judgments about whether the film’s tonal gambles and structural tricks work, making his reviews useful when the story or style is likely to divide audiences.
Australian cinema and screen culture
Buckmaster returns frequently to Australian film, treating new releases and repertory titles as part of a living screen culture rather than isolated works.
His writing on films such as Gurrumul, Bliss and Terror Nullius shows an interest in how Australian stories are told, how archives and cultural memory are remixed, and how local cinema sits within broader genre traditions. He has also written a biography of director George Miller, which signals a long-standing engagement with the history and craft of Australian filmmaking beyond single reviews.
Across these pieces he draws out thematic concerns and visual strategies, connecting individual films to wider patterns in how Australian artists represent identity, politics and landscape on screen.
Long-form criticism and pop culture essays
Alongside standard reviews, Buckmaster writes longer essays that use specific viewing projects to survey an artist’s body of work or a corner of popular culture. In a Guardian piece built around watching 627 minutes of Adam Driver movies, he structures the article as a journey through the actor’s filmography, mixing plot description, performance analysis and personal reaction to show how different roles accumulate into a career. He has also written about superhero cinema, including a piece on a pioneering superhero film, where he explores both the text itself and its place in the evolution of the genre.
These essays retain his analytic clarity but allow more room for humour, self-awareness and industry context, making them suitable when a story calls for a broader cultural or historical angle rather than a single-title review.
Work across outlets and industry engagement
Beyond his work for the Guardian, Buckmaster is a longstanding critic whose reviews and essays appear across specialist film publications and cultural journals. He is closely associated with Flicks, where he holds a senior critic role, and he contributes to other outlets including NME and Griffith Review, extending his coverage to wider questions of film culture and criticism. Festival programs and institutional platforms regularly quote his Guardian reviews, and he has facilitated panel discussions at film events, indicating that his criticism circulates within industry and cinephile spaces as well as the general readership.
That breadth of activity means he often approaches individual films with an awareness of how they will be received by both casual audiences and engaged film communities.
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