About.

Dr Luke Buckmaster is a film, TV and VR critic. He began writing reviews in 1997, when Tamagotchis were all the rage, Scottish scientists cloned a sheep named Dolly, and “Google” sounded like something you did with binoculars.

Buckmaster is currently film critic for The Guardian Australia and chief critic of Flicks.com.au, Australia’s most popular movie publication. In his spare time, Buckmaster runs the world-first virtual reality review website The VR Critic.

Buckmaster has contributed to a wide range of other publications including BBC Culture, VICE, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Senses of Cinema and many more. He has lectured about cinema for LaTrobe University and in 2010 and 2018 won an Australian Film Critics Association writing award (for his review of I’m Still Here and Ellipsis).

In 2014 and 2015 he presented digital literacy workshops on the topic of film and TV in social media for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and has conducted classes at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

In 2017, Buckmaster’s first book was published: a behind-the-scenes account of the Mad Max movies titled Miller and Max: George Miller and the making of a film legend. Buckmaster was the co-host of the ABC iView program The Critics, which ran for two seasons in 2016 and 2017, and in 2022 completed his doctoral thesis on virtual reality as a form of artistic expression.