Movie Trivia Quiz

About this test

Cinema is a little over 130 years old. The Lumière brothers' first paid public screening took place on 28 December 1895 at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, in front of around thirty people. In barely a century and a half, that fairground curiosity became the most heavily capitalised cultural industry in the world.

One verifiable anomaly says a lot about what awards actually measure: Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for Best Director and never won. Only three films share the record of eleven Academy Awards — Ben-Hur in 1959, Titanic in 1997 and The Return of the King in 2003. And it took until 2010 for a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, to win Best Director, eighty-two years after the ceremony was created.

To actually improve, the best exercise is not piling up films but following one complete filmography. Pick a director, watch the work in chronological order, and you will absorb the dates, the recurring collaborators and the shifts in style without effort. Ten films properly contextualised beat fifty watched at random.