Eavesdropping at the Movies

An event movie sold as much on its behind-the-scenes technical challenges as its story and genre, 1917 uses invisibly stitched long takes to convey the experiential fluidity of an overnight mission in World War I France, wherein two soldiers must hand deliver a message to the British front line to call off an offensive that will play into a German ambush. Mike is suspicious of films that market th...

José's seen it once and returns to its depths for a second time, alongside Mike, who knows nothing about it. Chinese writer-director Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey into Night, unrelated to Eugene O'Neill's play, tells a story that flashes between memories of a love lost long ago and present day reality, culminating in an hour-long single take that moves through an entire mining village. It's a film t...

Guy Ritchie returns to the guns 'n' geezers mine with The Gentlemen, a caper with a beautifully dressed and enjoyably playful cast. We discuss his stylish direction, ability to work with actors, the audiences that adore his work, how the film functions as fantasy, and its issues with being casually offensive. Recorded on 1st January 2020.

Its intentions are good, but we have trouble with Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's comedy about a young boy in Nazi Germany, a fanatical member of the Hitler Youth, who discovers a Jewish girl being given safe harbour by his mother. Our reservations stem from the state of the world and culture in which the film has been made, in which fascism is resurgent and increasingly worth taking seriously. We di...

José has been brushing up, recently rewatching the 1933, 1959 and 1994 adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's novel. Mike has neither seen any adaptations nor read the book, coming to the story entirely fresh. And so we get to grips with Greta Gerwig's wonderful, open-hearted, energetic version of Little Women. José finds much to contrast between the versions, picking up in particular on the unusual d...

The Star Wars saga ends - for the third time - with The Rise of Skywalker, a return to J. J. Abrams' whimsical ways, following Rian Johnson's creative and dramatic work in The Last Jedi. Disney and Abrams have clearly taken the vocal response of the franchise's self-appointed guardians seriously, overwriting everything we liked about Johnson's film, offering us mild, defanged plot developments and...

It made Mike so physically uncomfortable that he had to go into hiding. It caught José up, to his surprise as much as anyone else's, in its wildness and visual design. It has to be seen to be believed. It can only be Cats. Recorded on 20th December 2019.

A beautifully observed, intelligently written and transparently played drama, Marriage Story shows the separation of two people with deep and ongoing love for each other, and how they change under the stress of their marriage breakup. Mike argues that it's an advert for therapy, the unread notes in which each partner describes what they love about the other, with which the film opens, returning st...

Luis Ospina, the influential Colombian filmmaker who died very recently, was last month the subject of an mini retrospective of his work by MUBI, who showed three of his films: Agarrando pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty (1977, co-directed by Carlos Mayolo), Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger (2008), and his final feature documentary, Todo comenzó por el fin/It All Started at the End (2015), and we're g...

Adam Driver and Annette Bening shine in writer-director Scott Z. Burns' historical drama The Report, about Senate staffer Daniel Jones and Senator Dianne Feinstein's work to investigate the CIA's use of torture after 9/11. Mike's been filling up on this stuff lately, quite by coincidence, watching old episodes of The Daily Show; José didn't even know what the film was about, and the difference in...

A truly deserved biopic, Harriet tells the story of the escaped slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who served as part of the Underground Railroad, undertaking several journeys to liberate around 70 slaves, and later serving as in the Union Army during the American Civil War (this latter part of her life forming the film's coda, as its focus is her escape to Philadelphia and rescue missions)...

A trip to the Mockingbird Cinema in the Custard Factory yields a massively hyped up and receptive audience of fat white blokes for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Mike is one of them, and he's never been harder to pick out of a lineup, laughing like a drain at the fan service and antics. José isn't, and he was already a bit too old for Kevin Smith when he emerged in the 90s, but he has almost as good a...

Writer-director Rian Johnson's playful, knockabout whodunnit Knives Out has been receiving praise for its screenplay that we feel isn't quite warranted, and isn't much to look at either - but it's a lark, and one that carries some unexpected sociopolitical commentary. José argues that Johnson doesn't learn enough from the films upon which his pastiche is based, making too little of both the wonder...

Cars, business, and a big chummy Brummie combine in 1960s California as Ford sets itself the mission of beating the all-conquering Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, in a film that has not one but two boring titles: Ford v Ferrari in the USA, and Le Mans '66 in the UK. Mike had a good enough time to see it twice, even though it's directed by James Mangold, for whom he has little lo...

This year's Screening Rights Film Festival saw a great start with Permission, an Iranian film about women's rights, oppression, and male ego, based on the true story of Niloufar Ardalan, the captain of the Iranian women's futsal team whose husband barred her from leaving the country to play in an international final. After the film, José led a discussion with Riham Sheble and Dr. Saeed Zeydabadi-N...

A three-and-a-half-hour epic in his signature genre, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman looks back on the life of a gangster, hitman, enforcer, and WWII veteran, who loses everything. There's a familiar tone to much of the film, Scorsese getting the gang back together - Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel are wonderful to see, but perhaps the most enjoyable performance comes from Joe Pesci, his Russ a ca...

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn't very good. Recorded on 15th November 2019.

Comparisons to Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies are inescapable in Alejandro Landes' captivating Monos, about a group of teenage soldiers, stationed on a Colombian mountaintop, whose relationships and leadership break down during a descent into the jungle. We think about its central imagery, Mike arguing that one image above all speaks for the film as a whole, and its allegorical qualities, Jo...

Returning to Newcastle after shining his coruscating lens on the inhumanity of the benefits system in I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach now casts his eye on the gig economy and the exploitation of workers in Sorry We Missed You. A struggling dad and husband gets a job as a delivery driver, coerced into handling unfair responsibility and meeting impossible targets, with the stability of his family bearing...

A horror film that everyone knew about when Mike was a teenager, but nobody seemed to have seen, we finally see 1998's Ring - or Ringu, to transliterate the Japanese title. It's been beautifully restored in 4K and we were keen to see what all the fuss was about. And, truthfully, we're left still asking that. Its influence is obvious, Mike suggesting that alongside 1999's The Blair Witch Project it...

Shot in black and white on a clockwork camera from the 1970s, the hand-development of its 16mm film resulting in scratches and unpredictable changes in exposure, and its soundtrack entirely post-synchronised, Mark Jenkin's Bait is audiovisually suffused with atmosphere and texture, and not a little dreamlike and weird to boot. It tells the story of Martin, a Cornish fisherman struggling to cope wi...

Gemini Man lacks charm, wit, originality, intelligence, any real sense of understanding how to shoot action... but it's a technological showcase, and with 3D glasses on, sat in a cinema with a 60fps projector (120fps screenings, the film's native frame rate, are nigh-on impossible to come by), it provides a certain pleasure. We agree that the high frame rate, so widely criticised in Peter Jackson'...

It's enormously disappointing that Neither Wolf Nor Dog is as bad as it is, because its subject - Native American life in a society built upon a land that was taken from them, and the pain, grievances and stories that the displaced people carry with them - is massively, conspicuously underrepresented in US cinema and demands to be explored. Unfortunately, although the story on which it is based is...

Neither of us has ever seen classic British thriller Don't Look Now before, though we're keenly aware of the esteem in which it is held. And it's fair to say that we're blown away by the expressive visual design and editing style, though Mike at first admits to a certain degree of nonplussedness - a film's reputation for greatness can often result in a dampened experience when it is finally encoun...

José reminisces about Judy Garland as a feature of his childhood, a constant presence on his family's television, and as a person who took on different significance to him as he grew up. Whether he admits it or not, he's been keen to see Judy since the trailers first appeared. Mike, predictably, neither knows much about her nor cares, although he has seen The Wizard of Oz about a thousand times. T...