In the final few days of 2018, UK retailer HMV went bankrupt for the second time in just under six years. This news led a few readers to get in touch with questions about the numbers behind HMV’s decline.

The general tenor of the questions could be summed up as “Was HMV’s failure down to the industry’s move to digital delivery or to being more expensive than their rivals?”

It’s a fascinating topic and one which gets to the very heart of the changing face of the Home Entertainment sector, both in the UK and worldwide.  We’re not going to be able to ascribe an exact percentage of HMV’s woes to each of the factors, but we can look at what the numbers …

An annual stalwart of independent film, the Sundance Film Festival, kicks off in a couple of weeks.

In order to help those who are attending this year, I reached out to over a thousand past Sundance attendees to build a list of tips for surviving (and thriving) at the Sundance Film Festival.

This year, the festival is being held unusually late, starting on Thursday 24 January and finishing on Sunday 3rd February – only the second ever Sundance that has spilt over into February.

So here we have it. The tips below come from Sundance veterans with a combined total of over 600 trips to the festival.

• Arrive a day before your first meeting or event in order to get the lay of …

Ok, enough bickering and fighting. Let’s settle this once and for all in the only way I know how – going into a topic in way too much detail. As we prepare to enter the year 32 ADH (a.k.a. After Die Hard), the world is gripped by a constantly nagging question. No, it’s not “Why does everyone call Hans Gruber and his gang ‘terrorists’ when they were clearly bank robbers?” Today we’re going to use data to answer the question “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Along the way, we’re going to test Die Hard’s Christmas bona fides against all movies in US cinemas for the past thirty years, using a variety of methods. I have put details of my …

Boxing movie Creed II opens in a few weeks and the early reviews suggest that it will be worth watching.  This has spurred me on to investigate a couple of related questions asked by readers about sports movies.

Nada asked about the accuracy of the industry adage that “sports films don’t work” and Jason asked “Am I right to think sports movies are normally pretty bad?”

Let’s a take a quick look at sports movies over the past twenty years to see how true each of these assertions is.

To study this topic, I looked at all movies released in US cinemas over the past two decades (1998-2017, inclusive) and figured out which were classed as “sports movies” by IMDb. …