About me

My name is Julien Allen. I write about films.

I started taking cinema seriously when… I spent a year in France at the age of sixteen. I watched so much - and learned to love reading about films almost as much as watching them. My film education was forged as an undergraduate in London and Paris, in their magnificent repertory cinemas: the Electric, Le Champo, the Rio, l’Épée de Bois… and in the writing of Graham Greene, Andrew Sarris, Dilys Powell, the French culture TV show Le Cercle de Minuit, and the critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif.

I started writing for my own website, OrsonWelles.co.uk in 2004 and since 2008 have been privileged to write regularly for my favourite English language film magazine, the New York art house journal Reverse Shot (edited by Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert). I have also written for New York’s Lincoln Center’s prestigious film journal, Film Comment, as well as Toronto’s Cinema Scope and Melbourne’s Senses of Cinema. I write film criticism and essays on the Cinema for pleasure, in the amateur tradition, but for professional outlets. I specialize in the cinema of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Maurice Pialat and Ken Loach, as well as French popular cinema of the sixties and seventies. I am currently researching and working on a writing project about acting. JA

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