As the site reaches its first birthday, I thought I’d look back at some of my cinema firsts. I’ve picked ten things that stick in my memory as a kid growing up with a love of cinema. From my first film and first visit to the cinema, to the first sex scene I saw, the first horror film, and the first film I considered my personal favourite. Take a look and let us know some of your cinema firsts…

Those kids of the TV generation, bred on the old sci-fi serials that inspired Lucas to write Star Wars, really came to the fore in the 1980s thanks to the successes seen by Lucas and Spielberg in the late 1970s. The two Godfather’s of the blockbuster continued to be at the forefront of family-orientated science-fiction with “Empire Strikes Back” and “E.T.”, while those inspired by their method like Zemeckis, Dante, and Robbins took us on more adventurous journeys into the fantastical. For the fantasy and science-fiction genres, there are few periods in film history better than the 1980s. Children, with their love of adventure and fairytale, had never had it so good.

The ‘coming of age’ movie is a bit ambiguous. There’s a tendency to link the sub-genre to films about kids, so Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars seemingly came of age too late in life. It appears there’s a timeframe on the coming of age movie that sits somewhere between childhood and adulthood before, as protagonists grow into their twenties, the film fuses itself with other sub-genres like the yuppie-in-peril or social problem movie …