Anna Smith is a film critic and broadcaster and the host of all-female film review show Girls On Film in which she discusses film with female critics and interviews actors and directors about their work. She is President of the UK Critics’ Circle and a regular film critic for BBC News, Sky News, BBC Radio, Metro, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sight & Sound, Empire and more.

If you stayed up to watch the Oscars this year, you will have seen Anna commentating from Sky Cinema’s sofa – and if you browse through Metro newspaper in the morning, you’ll have read her ’60 Seconds’ interviews. Anna hosts Q&As with film stars in cinemas all over London.

Before specialising in film, Anna was the first woman to become the editor of a UK dance music magazine, Wax. She dedicated herself to film criticism in 2000. Her twitter is @annasmithjourno.

Award-winning broadcaster, writer, educationalist and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling is best known for his study of popular culture. His most recent publications are The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinophobia (2014), Frankenstein: The First 200 Years (2017) and Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece (2019).

He has had a wide output as a writer and critic on subjects ranging from vampires to westerns and has written and presented television series such as The Art of Persuasion on advertising, Strange Landscape on the Middle Ages, The Face of Tutankhamun and Nightmare: Birth of Horror. He has conducted a series of radio and television interviews with figures from the world of film, including Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, Ken Adam, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood.

Frayling studied spaghetti westerns and specifically director Sergio Leone. His highly popular biography of Leone, Something To Do With Death (2000) was followed by the DVD documentaries of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and audio commentaries for the special edition DVD releases of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West and The Colossus of Rhodes. He curates an international travelling exhibition on Sergio Leone.

In 2001, he was awarded a knighthood for “Services to Art and Design Education” and chose as his motto, Perge scelus mihi diem perficias’, which can be translated as ‘Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit’. That is, ‘Go ahead, punk, make my day’.

He has 18 books to his credit and has been chairman of the Arts Council and the Design Council, a governor of the British Film Institute, and trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum where he co-curated the Hollywood Costume exhibition, which was exhibited from October 2012 to January 2013.

Naomi Clifford focuses on historical subjects, drawing out long-forgotten true-life stories from the archives. Her latest book, The Murder of Mary Ashford: The Crime That Changed English Legal History (2018), published by Pen and Sword, looks at a notorious case of rape-murder which involved the last legal challenge to hand-to-hand combat and, through a discovery in the archives, finally positively identifies the perpetrator of the crime. The Disappearance of Maria Glenn (2016) relates the rollercoaster fortunes of a teenage heiress stolen from her family in 1817 and explores the world of elopement and abduction and Women and the Gallows 1797-1837 (2017) tells the stories of 131 women who were hanged.

She is currently writing a book about the life of a volunteer ambulance driver working in Chelsea, London during the Blitz.

Naomi has long experience in journalism and online projects but, as she says, her first love is libraries and archives. “I get a buzz out of just being there amongst the original sources – and when I start delving into the archives I feel like a detective on a case.” She has previously written under the name Naomi Lourie Klein.