Pop Screen

Listeners, are you aware that Shuhada Sadaqat - or Sinead O'Connor, as she was - once played the Virgin Mary? If that sounds like a provocative idea, you ain't seen nothing yet. Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy is one of the darkest and most mordantly funny entries in a directorial career that's also included Interview With the Vampire and The Company of Wolves, and we've got We Are Cult 's Mark Cunl...

It's spooky season again on Pop Screen, and this month we're kicking off with a look at Ti West's saucy seventies slasher X, starring Kid Cudi along with Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson and Mia Goth again. And since it's not a Halloween show without Directors Uncut host Rob, we've got Rob back in to talk about the film's generational politics, praise its light-touch evocation of the 1970...

It was sixty years ago... well, not today, exactly, but soon, when the Beatles released their first single, so to celebrate Pop Screen is returning to their screen canon for the first time since our very first episode . An experimental, influential animated freak-out, Yellow Submarine was made to fill out the band's movie contract but became so, so much more (although being more than that isn't di...

Ah-hah, hush that fuss, Pop Screen is back with Graham and Dreaming Machine 's Joe to take a look at OutKast's 2006 movie vehicle Idlewild. It's not uncommon for rappers to make their big-screen debuts by playing gangsters, but as ever Andre 3000 and Big Boi found their own unique way of doing things, by setting it all in an anachronistically-scored Black bohemia in the 1930s. It's a gangster movi...

This week's film is one that Graham struggles to accept really exists - which is why it's a good job Mark Harrison from Film Stories has rejoined the podcast to reassure him that this wasn't a hallucination. Did we really watch a movie where Status Quo try and foil SNL veteran Jon Lovitz's underground organ trafficking ring in an extended homage to The Deer Hunter? It appears that we did, and now...

This week's Pop Screen is for people who like their cars fast, their movies mellow and their Californian singer-songwriters practically horizontal, as Aidan returns to the podcast to look at Monte Hellman's cult road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. A none-more-70s tale of dead-end lives on the open road, it owes something of its laid-back cool to its two lead actors: Laurel Canyon mainstay James Taylor a...

Dust off your tinfoil hats, Pop Screen is going conspiracy barmy with this week's episode on 1983's Wavelength. A Roger Corman-produced science fiction thriller starring The Runaways' Cherie Currie as a psychic who guides her singer-songwriter friend towards a military base full of captured extraterrestrials, it's notable for a great Tangerine Dream score, striking location shooting at LA's ominou...

This is (for) hardcore (fans): in celebrating the work of singer, radio host, memoirist and Greatest Living Englishman Jarvis Cocker, we could have picked anything from a Wes Anderson film to a Harry Potter one. Instead, Graham and Ewan have reunited for a look at a true collectors item, his 1999 Channel 4 documentary series about outsider art. See Jarvis tour the world visiting houses, gardens, c...

This week, Pop Screen is warming up its fingers to peruse the lexicon of love with Mantrap, a short film starring ABC - but mostly their lead singer Martin Fry - and directed by Pop Screen's patron saint Julien Temple. Once again, we're joined by Gav Smith from the very fine My Favourite Film podcast, as he takes on his most challenging assignment to date - persuading Graham that early '80s synth...

It's in the trees! It's coming! Yes, this week Pop Screen is gleefully hopping on board the Kate Bush bandwagon - what else were we going to do, wait for a new album or tour? - with a look at the Blessed Kate's two main acting credits. The Line, The Cross and the Curve is her now-disowned directorial debut, released to tie in with her album The Red Shoes and loosely inspired by the Hans Christian...

Pop Screen's Bowie month ends in the only way it was ever going to: with a lot of talk about Muppets and 'packages'. Made during a critical and commercial low point in Bowie's musical career, this elaborate Jim Henson-directed fantasy nevertheless gave him one of his most celebrated screen roles - and, in its maddeningly catchy musical numbers, gave us easily the most enjoyable songs of his mid-80...

The centrepiece of Pop Screen's Bowie month could only be one thing: David's first, extraordinary lead role, as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg's trippy science fiction masterpiece. For those unfamiliar with the film, Bowie plays an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to bring water back to his home planet, funding his return trip by patenting alien technology. But the world of high fina...

Yeah, when we announced a month of David Bowie movies, you weren't expecting this one, were you? An adaptation of an obscure early Berthold Brecht play that Bowie recorded for the BBC in between Scary Monsters and Let's Dance, Baal is quite probably the most challenging artefact in his screen career - and we're including the Twin Peaks movie in that tally. But it's also thematically linked to his...

Pop Screen kicks off a special month dedicated to the films of David Bowie with perhaps his last great role, as the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's equally enigmatic thriller. A story of magic, revenge and dead wives (look, we said it was a Christopher Nolan film), it sees Bowie join a remarkable cast including Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson,...

We normally use a still from the film for our episode image, but who could resist this photo from the premiere of Neill Blomkamp's Chappie? It perfectly encapsulates the bizarre appeal of the film, which assembles an enviable cast of blue-chip movie stars and reliable character actors, then has them play support to a Johnny 5/Robocop hybrid and a South African rap group, not necessarily in that or...

It's no surprise that Pop Screen keeps going back to the 1960s - in many ways, that decade saw the birth of the pop movie as a recognisable genre. That doesn't mean that every film became a classic, although the film we're looking at today became a cult classic of the most disreputable type. Famously described by Mark Kermode as "the Plan 9 from Outer Space of musicals", Robert Hartford-Davis's Go...

When Graham and Sarah decided to do an episode on Never Rarely Sometimes Always, it was not a topical film. Its storyline, about a young girl crossing state lines in order to get an abortion, now puts it at the forefront of a major American news story, but there's much more to Eliza Hittman's film than being merely newsworthy. It's a haunting, measured, beautifully acted and shot film that never l...

Can you believe this is our first Jim Jarmusch episode? The white-haired director's habit of casting musicians means pretty much all of his films qualify for this show, with regular collaborators including Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA. All of them turn up in this, his ensemble zombie comedy from 2019, along with the rather less expected name of Selena Gomez. (Gomez's presence does at least mean thi...

We're returning to the pop landscape of the early 2000s this week, a pop landscape that had your host Graham wondering whether there was any point being a pop cartographer any more. The dominant feature of said landscape was TV talent shows, usually run by either Simon Cowell or his Salieri, Simon Fuller, the latter of whom masterminded this week's film. A modern-day beach party movie starring fir...

Pop Screen is going into hardcore auteur territory this week, with a film directed by and starring the one and only Barbara Streisand. A story of hidden family secrets, illicit affairs, licit affairs, quasi-licit affairs - look, there's a lot of affairs, alright? - it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars while Streisand was snubbed for Best Director, suggesting her music career was prevent...

Pop Screen is going a bit off the beaten track this week, but rewardingly so. Peter Watkins is a maverick British director whose previous film The War Game was banned on the instruction of then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, so when he was hired by Universal to make a teen-focused rock and roll film they probably expected something insurrectionary. What they might not have expected is for Watkins t...

Can you believe this is Pop Screen's first animated film? Better late than never, as Gav Smith of My Favourite Film rejoins us to talk about Interstella 5555 - The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A story as epic as its frankly overlong title, it was created by Daft Punk as both a homage to the anime they loved growing up and a visual accompaniment to their classic 2001 album Discovery. On this we...

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-Moonstruck, a film which is not exactly subtle in its depiction of Italian-American culture but is at least witty, well-written and full of heart, thanks to its script by John Patrick Shanley. This week, Pop Screen closes out its Oscars month by inviting playwright Sarah Hayton back on to discuss Norman Jewison's 1987 film, which won Cher...

Pop Screen's Oscar month continues with one of the 21st century's biggest collectors of little bald gold men - Rob Marshall's Chicago. Among its twelve nominations and six wins was a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1990s hip-hop stalwart Queen Latifah, who gets a solo number crammed with innuendo, but she was beaten to the win by her own cast-mate Catherine Zeta-Jones. This week, Cliff from...

Pop Screen's Oscar month goes back to, er, 2021 with the film widely predicted to win Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Less a biopic of the titular blues singer and more a drama about temptation and (often racial) exploitation adapted  from August Wilson's play, it nevertheless features a powerhouse, Oscar-nominated turn from Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. This week, Ewan...