The Cineskinny

In this episode, the team was bowled over by Dreams, part of a new arthouse trilogy by Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud called The Oslo Stories Trilogy (not to be confused with Joachim Trier's similarly named Oslo Trilogy). The other two instalments - Love and Sex - are released later in August. Dreams got us talking about our favourite trilogies in general, from the first three Toy St...

On this week’s podcast, we head off in two *completely* different directions – the gang review art doc/biopic hybrid The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, then Anahit sings the praises of the new Superman movie. Cinema - it truly has a bit of everything. Elsewhere, Jamie reports back from Karlovy Vary Film Festival in his fresh KVIFF t-shirt, the squad discuss the idea of cult cinema (what is it, good ex...

On this week's show, the Edinburgh Filmhouse is back, bay-bee! Peter, Jamie and Anahit offer their thoughts and well-wishes after each visiting it on opening weekend. If you've ever wanted to hear us talk about legroom and patina, you're in luck. Film-wise, we review Pavements, Alex Ross Perry's multi-stranded doc/biopic/musical of Peter's favourite 90s slacker indie band, and 28 Years Later, Dann...

Owing to there being a dearth of great films out in June, we've ditched our usual format and for one week only we're doing a 'call-in' show. We asked our listeners to send in questions and voice notes, and they sent in loads, quizing us on myriad subjects, from sexiness in film to our ideal directors' dinner party to which film characters would make for terrible flatmates.  TIMESTAMPS: "They’re ad...

John Maclean's new film Tornado is a samurai revenge western, shot in the hilly countryside around Edinburgh, starring Kôki, Jack Lowden and Tim Roth. Jamie caught up with John earlier in the year to discuss the film and how it all came about – with Tornado hitting UK cinemas this weekend, here's another chance to hear that chat.  Get us on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram and Letterboxd  @thecineskinn...

On the latest episode of The CineSkinny, we take a wild trip with a ruthless tycoon (Benicio del Toro), his deeply moral daughter (Mia Threapleton) and his Swedish tutor-cum-secretary (Michael Cera) in Wes Anderson's breakneck espionage comedy The Phoenician Scheme.  We come back down to earth with the urgent and enraging documentary The Encampments, which takes us inside the Palestine solidarity...

Greetings The Cineskinny listeners - before our next full episode drops, here's something else you might like. It's a new Scottish music podcast, it's called MUSIC NOW, and the first episode is an interview with the amazing piper and composer Malin Lewis. Here's a clip about songwriting and making a new instrument basically from scratch – links to the full episode below. Godspeed, enjoy, more film...

A bumper pod this week –  we review Amalia Ulman's Magic Farm about a bunch of hipster journalists getting lost in Argentina, and India Donaldson's Good One about a v v awkward intergenerational camping trip. But that's not all! We also dig into Wes Anderson's ornate cinematic toolbox ahead of The Phoenician Scheme, so we're talking family, casting, animation, etc etc. But that's still not all! Ja...

On this week's pod, two hot, hot movies. First up, Sinners, Ryan Coogler's sexy Southern Gothic vampire flick set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. It's got two Michael B Jordans, it's got epic musical sequences, it's got exquisite period detail, it's got spit sharing, it's got a smart and thorny race analogy at its heart, it's got great actors bringing their A game, it's got wonderful post-credit scen...

In a change to our usual format, we review only one film this episode: the French coming-of-age film Holy Cow. Set in Jura, in the east of France near the Swiss border, it follows a wild 18-year-old lad who has to grow up fast and learn how to make some award-winning Comté after a family tragedy. The rest of the episode sees Peter, Anahit, and Jamie discuss what they’ve been watching on the big an...

This week, we review Bong Joon-Ho's latest – Mickey 17 stars multiple Robert Pattinsons and Mark Ruffalo doing what we're assured is not an impression of any named individual. We also dive into the lovely 3D animated waters of Flow, Oscar-winning animation and, fun fact, the highest grossing Latvian film of all time.  Elsewhere, we interrogate horrid visions of surveillance, intrigue, subterfuge a...

On this edition of The CineSkinny we take a look at two of the most anticipated Scottish films of the year. First we review On Falling, the deeply impressive feature debut from Edinburgh-based director Laura Carreira.  And fresh from his second feature Tornado having its world premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, we have an interview with John Maclean who talks about westerns, samurai films, and the...

Glasgow Film Festival is one of the most exciting times in Scottish cinema, so this week we dive headfirst and two-footed into the GFF programme with a trio of reviews and some additional chat. We discuss Marie Losier's art doc Peaches Goes Bananas; talk through the excellent Austrian comedy Peacock; and luxuriate in the lo-fi animation of Boys Go To Jupiter. Elsewhere, there's a weird smell, Jami...

With the film world mourning the loss of David Lynch, the most original and influential American filmmaker of the late 20th and early 21st century, The CineSkinny pay their own tribute by tracing a line through his career from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to The Straight Story.  We also review two new releases: Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a surprisingly propulsive drama exploring...

In a departure from our regular scheduled programming, it's the panel from our Queer Cinema Sundays screening of Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime at Glasgow Film Theatre. The sound quality is a bit patchy but our boy on the 1s and 2s has done his best – if you're a fan of Dolan's films, yearn for a bit of chat about some of queer cinema's current leading lights from Celine Sciamma to Luca Guad...

The podcast is back, and we're having just as much fun talking about the films as ever (medium-to-high). For a first pod back, we chat Nosferatu, Babygirl and the new Wallace and Gromit, talk through our holiday rewatching, and look ahead to some of the films on the 2025 schedule. The cinema, it lives on! TIMESTAMPS: What We've Been Watching (4:30) Nosferatu review (13:30) Babygirl review (26:05)...

It's our now-annual recap of the year as Anahit, Jamie, Ellie and Peter pick out some of the favourite performances, moments, needle drops and hot boys of the past year in the kino. You know we love Challengers and Love Lies Bleeding, but did you know we also loved a slept-on Koreeda banger, a queer time-hop costume drama and shouting about bad romcoms? You did? Well this'll be right up your stree...

The Earth has almost done another of its rotations of the Sun, so once again it's time for The CineSkinny team to take a whistlestop tour of the films that The Skinny's film writers voted as the best of the year. It's an eclectic list that takes us from Poor Things to The Zone of Interest, via I Saw the TV Glow, Kneecap and Anora.  The full team – Anahit Behrooz, Ellie Robertson, Jamie Dunn and Pe...

Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig team up to adapt William Burroughs in Luca's second film of 2024, Queer, so we talk about that. Elizabeth Sankey draws the line between society's flawed understanding of post-partum mental health and society's flawed understanding of witchcraft in new doc Witches, so we talk about that as well. And Grand Theft Hamlet is *sort of* what it says on the tin, in that it...

This week we review two films from directors who like to shine a light on communities on the margins. First up, we take a look at the coming-of-age drama Bird, the sixth feature film from Andrea Arnold. It concerns a young girl named Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who thinks she's met a kindred spirit in the title character Bird, played by Franz Rogowski. But all is not as it seems.  Next, it's Anora, the...

The great Francis Ford Coppola spent 40 years and $120 million of his own money making the epic saga Megalopolis. Was the years of toil and expense worth it? We also look at two stunningly original documentaries concerned with art: Mati Diop's Dahomey, which follows the process of 26 royal treasures being returned from France to their rightful home in Benin; and Mark Cousins's A Sudden Glimpse to...

Two great Scottish films this week: The Outrun, the big screen adaptation of Amy Liptrot's book with a great starring turn by Saoirse Ronan, and Since Yesterday, a documentary celebrating the forgotten girl bands from Scotland's musical past. We review those two, then go all punchy-jumpy-shouty with some chat about action cinema in honour of a new restoration of Point Break and a BFI season of act...

This time, we're talking about one of Anahit's favourite films of all, Tarsem Singh's 2006 opus and Tumblr's Favourite Film™, The Fall. It's back, it's in 4K, and it's grrrreat. Elsewhere, we talk about the less successful but still-ambitious In Camera, and look back on some of filmmaking's biggest swings. Terrence Malick, Tommy Wiseau, big piles of white powder and on-retainer helicopter pilots –...

We're talking about obsession on this week's podcast after falling for the curious Quebecois courtroom drama/tech thriller Red Rooms. We also delve into a film that crosses two circles on The CineSkinny's Venn diagram of interests: folk horror and creepy puppets. That film is the 70s-set British horror film Starve Acre. We also receive a missive from Anahit, who's attending Venice Film Festival, w...

On the latest episode of The CineSkinny, we take a look at the blistering Kneecap, an irresistible piece of myth-making from the firebrand Belfast rap trio of the same name. The film follows best friends, drug dealers and wannabe rappers Liam and Naoise (also known as Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap) as they avoid the Belfast ‘peelers’ and a group of ex-paramilitaries out to get them before teaming up wit...