Pop Screen

Pop Screen's Halloween month concludes with this cult '80s horror comedy, in which a standard plot for the decade's teen movies - two wannabe frat boys go on a trip to find the perfect stripper, with Gedde Watanabe in tow playing a racial stereotype - is gatecrashed by Grace Jones as a genuinely imposing queen vampire. Silent, seductive, and prone to chewing people's throats out wi...

You'd think any movie with the stars of Bill and Ted that came out in 1993 would be a sure-fire hit. You'd think so - but that would reckon without how hard Alex Winter tries to alienate the audience in Freaked, the cult horror-comedy he co-directed, co-wrote and starred in. As arrogant teen comedy star Ricky Coogin, Winter delivers an unforgettably grotesque performance even before he&#39...

Is it time to reassess the '90s Street Fighter movie? That's right, Pop Screen is entering the arena of public opinion and fighting for the death this week as we attempt to persuade you that Steven S. DeSouza's 1994 Street Fighter adaptation is both an intentional comedy and a good one at that. That doesn't mean everyone is in on the joke - but some of the people who aren't are...

You wouldn't think a film with a name like Steve would prompt such a wild variety of tangents, but it's all here, from Graham's hatred of eggs to Mark's attempt to restart the War of the Roses. Yes, we're talking about Steve, the Netflix film starring Cillian Murphy and co-starring everyone from Tracey Ullman to Little Simz, the latter fresh off the back of making Graham's...

In the same year, Nick Cave sang The Mercy Seat and appeared in this brutal prison drama, the first film from his regular music video collaborator John Hillcoat. You'd ask if he was OK, but it's late-'80s Nick Cave: he absolutely wasn't. A brutal, shocking look at a near-future prison accelerating towards a riot, Cave's cameo as a new inmate who decorates his cell walls with hi...

Can you believe this is the first Spike Lee movie we've covered on the podcast? Lee is a director who's always had something to say about music, not always complimentary, and his Akira Kurosawa remake Highest 2 Lowest copped some flack for its take on modern hip-hop. It's the story of a legendary record label boss, played by Lee's recurrent collaborator Denzel Washington, who sprin...

After the inevitable Christmas number one, the life of an X Factor winner isn't always easy. But Shayne Ward, of 'That's My Goal' fame - stop pretending you don't know it - had something unique to fall back on. A stint on Coronation Street gave him enough acting cred, and willing co-stars, to star in his own murder mystery series where he plays an ex-cop turned cruise ship sing...

Have you ever seen a hitman movie and thought "It's good, but it needs to be shot entirely in infra-red?" No, because no-one has - except Harmony Korine. After looking at his most famous film Spring Breakers a couple of years back, Robyn and Graham now reunite to talk about the first film from his excellently-named production company EDGELRD, a film whose strangeness is not limited t...

Has Pop Screen gone highbrow? A biopic of a classical composer isn't normally the kind of film we'd cover, but then biopics of classical composers aren't usually anything like Lisztomania. The final instalment in Ken Russell's legendary series of films about his classical music heroes, it stars Roger Daltrey from The Who as Franz Liszt, Ringo Starr as the Pope, and this is not even...

Madness! Madness, they call them Madness, which is fair enough, because that's their name. At a very early stage in their quest to become one of Britain's most beloved bands, the Nutty Boys starred in a semi-improvised film about their formation and rise to fame. It was called Take It Or Leave It, it was surprisingly serious in tone, and it was, as Suggs put it, "the beginning and the...

It's playtime! Pop Screen is starting a themed month on "autobiopics" - films where pop stars play themselves, but in a different context to the standard rock doc. The nearest we'll get to documentary is this film by Morgan Neville, which sees Pharrell Williams talk about his incredible career and range of star collaborators - Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z and more - throug...

"So we're doing this, right?" The new film from David Lowery, the director of The Green Knight, is not a love story, it's not a ghost story, and a lot of people aren't sure what it is at all. We know it's definitely about a very Gaga-esque pop star played by Anne Hathaway trying to heal the wounds of the past with her estranged dress designer (Michaela Coel), and we know...

It's one of the great films of the '90s, from one of the most Pop Screen-friendly directors of all time: Jim Jarmusch, a man who can't even make a little family drama without sticking Tom Waits in there. Here, he's making a Western starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, a lot of people who would go on to be very famous, and the former lead singer of the Stooges. In a dress and bonne...

Back to the '90s, and a time when a movie could just be, y'know, anything you wanted. The co-writer of Sid & Nancy, Abbe Wool, went to test this theory with this wilfully inconsequential road movie in which a member of X (John Doe) and a member of The Beastie Boys (Adam "Ad-Rock" Horowitz) set off to scatter the ashes of a friend of the former musician. It's really the ex...

The Jimi Hendrix estate have been notably controlling of the film rights to his life story since his death at the totemic age of 27. Hollywood, though, cannot stand for a classic rock star to go un-biopicised (it's a word now), which is why in 2013 John Ridley got Andre Benjamin - yes, Andre 3000 from OutKast - to play the legendary guitarist in Jimi: All is By My Side, a film tackling Hendrix...

The history of pop is as much about subcultures as it is music, and this week Pop Screen is diving into one of the most enduring (at least round co-host Mick's gaff): mod. From its origins, which were so controversial the phrase "moral panic" was coined to describe the press reaction (fact!) to the late '70s revival that gave the world The Jam, there's always been some corner...

SAMMEH! Yes, finally we're getting round to Ryan Coogler's box-office-busting, Oscars-history-making period vampire gangster epic. Joe from Dreaming Machine rejoins Graham to talk about how Coogler's hit film explores the history, tradition and continued relevance of the blues, all the time mindful of our... let's say shaky status as two white guys talking about this. We want your...

Have you seen The Bride yet? No, not Maggie Gyllenhaal's new film - we mean the 1985 film by Frank Roddam, director of Quadrophenia. Like Gyllenhaal's film, it's an attempt at a female-centred sequel to Mary Shelley's novel. Unlike Gyllenhaal's film, it has an actively deranged cast list including Quentin Crisp, Alexei Sayle, Ken Campbell, David Rapaport... and, as Dr. Frankens...

It's the documentary you never knew you needed, and you do need it. Marcie Hume's chronicle of life on the road with '80s child actor Corey Feldman and his backing band of skimpily-dressed 'Angels' tracks the fallout from his infamous 2016 Today Show performance, which went viral and had the world asking questions like "Is this a sex cult?" and "No, seriously, is...

This week, Pop Screen takes you to church. On its release, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace became the biggest-selling gospel album of all time, but it was only supposed to be half the story. Originally, it was going to accompany a concert film with the Queen of Soul going back to her roots at an LA baptist church - but that fell through for the dumbest imaginable reason. To find out what that...

Can it really be ten years since David Bowie died? This week, Pop Screen dives back into the prolific screen career of the Thin White Duke with one of his sexiest, most stylish and silliest films - Tony Scott's 1983 debut The Hunger. A story of vampirism, lesbianism and extremely '80s stylistic mannerisms, it co-stars Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. Join Graham and Mick as they discu...

Another year's over, so it's time to convene an Avengers movie's worth of Geek Show contributors to answer the only question that matters: what was good this year? Did Sinners live up to the hype? What was our pick of the Oscar race? Did 28 Years Later live up to Simon's extremely exacting standards of realism for Geordie accents? In this packed show, Graham and Rob are joined by K...

Roll up, roll up, and let Mark and Graham take you back to 1967, a time when the Beatles had already conquered cinema with Richard Lester. As a result, they decided to make their own film, with no script and the entire band as co-directors, then broadcast it on BBC One on Boxing Day. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, as it turned out, although Magical Mystery Tour still has a substantial cult f...

It's the dead of winter, so what better time to watch the frostiest of music movies - in every sense? Set in a bitterly cold early '60s New York, the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis sees Oscar Isaac's titular folk singer getting the cold shoulder wherever he goes, whether it's from his volcanically angry ex, played by Carey Mulligan, or the strange hand of fate itself. This...

Get yourself a couple of small beers, pop The Battle of Algiers on and enjoy a (French) 75 minutes with Graham and Simon talking about arguably THEE film of 2025 - Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. The story of a gone-to-seed revolutionary fighting to protect his daughter from a simultaneously ridiculous and plausible nemesis, it's a big-budget epic with the soul of a weird...