Pop Screen

March is Oscar month on Pop Screen, and as luck would have it one of this year's frontrunners is absolutely made for us. A goofy, shaggy 1970s coming-of-age comedy featuring a Tom Waits cameo, the entire band HAIM and their parents - seriously, their real-life parents - it's inspired rabid devotion and some dissent for its treatment of racial prejudice, age-gap relationships and its outspoken pro-...

What kind of film do you think the above image is from, listeners? If you answered "Why, a biopic of a 1960s rock band, of course", congratulations - you are Oliver Stone, and this is an episode of Pop Screen about your 1991 film The Doors. Join Doors fan Aidan and Doors, uh, not-fan Graham for an exploration of this fabulously lavish, maddeningly shallow account of Jim Morrison's life and death,...

Back in 2007, Wong Kar-Wai could have done anything for his first American film. What he chose to do was cast easy-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones in a road movie where she would play alongside David Straithairn, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Natalie Portman, and tell her not to take acting lessons because she's such a natural. Which, you must agree, is a choice! On this week's Pop Screen, Sarah and Graha...

The 1960s were, depending on your viewpoint, either the best or the worst time to release a film about political assassinations, and there weren't many wilder examples than John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. A wildly paranoid tale of a returning military veteran convinced that one of his brothers-in-arms is now a brainwashed Communist assassin, it essentially created the conspiracy thr...

Looky looky at our black booky: this week Pop Screen is looking at an artefact of the utmost early '90sness, Vanilla Ice's first and only starring vehicle Cool As Ice. Deeply influenced by the teen rebel films of the 1950s and shot by Spielberg's future DoP Janusz Kaminski, these classy influences sit uncomfortably with a story in which Kristin Minter falls in love with the Iceman after he nearly...

Pop Screen is 50 episodes old! To celebrate, we've got Gav Smith from the My Favourite Film podcast back in to cover one of the big names (in terms of profile, if not in height) that we haven't covered so far - Prince, and his blockbuster first movie Purple Rain. Gav is a Prince superfan, Graham a Prince ignoramus - can he be converted? More a vehicle for the extraordinary album accompanying it th...

Pop Screen makes another foray into the documentary realm this week, with Aidan rejoining regular host Graham to look at Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. An ambitious film rooted as much in its subject's imagination as it is the facts of his life, it was highly acclaimed as a portrait of the late Kurt Cobain, even as its strict factual accuracy was debated. As well as Morgen...

A pop movie is normally a chance to consolidate, rather than destroy, an image, which is why the Monkees' sole trip in front of the camera is such a strange affair. Produced by BBS Productions at the same time as they were making Easy Rider - and with the Dennis Hopper cameo to prove it - 1968's Head is a freeform collection of surrealist sketches, musical numbers and anti-war agitprop, shot throu...

After making one of the definitive rock biopics with Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox was hired to document The Pogues, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello as they toured Nicaragua. When it was decided that sending a bunch of rock stars to tour a country which had recently been at war was a bad idea, Cox made Straight to Hell instead, a spaghetti Western parody with Strummer as the leader of a group of bank...

Cum on Feel the Podcazt! This week Pop Screen celebrates the festive period with a band who, without a sleigh bell in earshot, conjure up the spirit of Christmas. It can only be Slade, who got debutant director Richard Loncraine to make their one and only feature film, the oft-mistitled (not least by us) Flame, in 1975. Despite being released at the height of their popularity, it wasn't a hit - so...

Pop Screen is going all topical this week, eschewing our usual cult classics and reviewing a film released this year - so be warned, there are spoilers! It's Annette, an extraordinary, divisive musical by extraordinary, divisive director Leos Carax, with a full original score by extraord... you get the picture, it's Sparks, the score is by Sparks. Join Graham and Mark as they examine this surprisi...

We hope all our American listeners had a happy Life Day recently - if not, let this week's Pop Screen put you in the party mood. In 1978, just one year after A New Hope was released, the stars of George Lucas's original blockbuster reconvened for a bizarrely misconceived variety show that's never been officially re-released. They were joined by guests including Art Carney, Jefferson Starship and B...

Shahid Mohammed, cut it with precision: this week Pop Screen is going back to the Daisy Age of hip-hop with Michael Rapaport's documentary Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Somewhat incredibly the first ever documentary about a hip-hop band, this warts-and-all look at Tribe's history annoyed Q-Tip by focusing on the tensions between him and the late Phife Dawg. But the...

Pop Screen is back, back, back with Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (x2) as Cult Following 's Ewan Gleadow rejoins Graham to talk about I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's surreal anti-biopic with six different stars embodying different aspects of Dylan's persona. There's Cate Blanchett as the controversially-electrified superstar Dylan, Christian Bale as protest-singer Dylan, Richard Gere as enigmatic r...

Hey you! It's time for Pop Screen to tackle one of the earliest, most expensive and most flamboyant product of the 1980s crossover between music video and cinema: Pink Floyd - The Wall. Based closely on Roger Waters's semi-autobiographical songs, director Alan Parker and animator Gerald Scarfe produced an epic fantasy of isolation, trauma, totalitarianism and grief that caused no less a figure tha...

It's the most wonderful time of the year - Halloween, obviously - and Pop Screen is convening Graham, Rob and Mick to discuss one of the all-time great horror movies featuring a pop star - David Cronenberg's Videodrome, featuring Blondie's Debbie Harry as a media psychotherapist who discovers a conspiracy to use video signals to suppress the new flesh. And what is the new flesh? We've all watched...

Since its premiere at Chicago's Cinepocalypse festival, Glenn Danzig's directorial debut Verotika has gone down in legend. Not a good legend, but then as Countess Elizabeth Bathory would tell you not all legends are good. This week on Pop Screen, Ewan Gleadow from Cult Following rejoins us to discuss Danzig's three-part magnum opus, based on stories from his own Verotik comics imprint. Along the w...

Well, we're certainly not pro-bellum. This week Mick from Behold! pod joins us again to look at a film that seems to have everything going for it: a pair of hotly-tipped debuting directors, a provocative, mind-bending premise, and a quality cast. Even more promisingly, that quality cast is headed up by Janelle Monae, who Graham cites as the only musician capable of filling the void left by Prince...

A trilogy of Black horror and science fiction tales, hosted by the disembodied floating head of funk legend George Clinton? It happened! Kicking off Pop Screen's Halloween month, Geek Show kingpin Rob joins us once again to look at one of the stranger products of HBO's post-Tales from the Crypt hunt for a new anthology series - Reginald D Hudlin's Cosmic Slop. Quickly forgotten, it was edited into...

This week, Pop Screen has been thinking about a line drawn in the sand: specifically, a line drawn between the reasonable criticisms of PJ Harvey's 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, and the ones that took her to task for not working out a viable model for bringing stable democracy to Afghanistan. (Yes, really) 2019's Seamus Murphy-directed documentary A Dog Called Money reopened the cont...

Oi! I said oi! Pop Screen has its hardest-hitting episode this week - yes, perhaps even grittier than Spice World - with Ben "Plan B" Drew's directorial debut Ill Manors. A multi-stranded tale of drug-dealing, deprivation and all-round dodginess in Forest Gate, it has its roots in Drew's 2008 short film Michelle. On release, however, it became an unexpected talking point thanks to the then-recent...

Once a reviled commercial disaster, today David Lynch's Dune is... a tolerated commercial disaster? It has its fans, it has its naysayers, so before Denis Villeneuve launches his much-anticipated adaptation of (the first half of) Frank Herbert's novel Graham and Archaeon are convening to deliver the final verdict on a film Lynch hated so much he asked for the extended cut to be credited to "Judas...

Best remembered for containing Damon Albarn's one film acting performance, as wet-behind-the-ears aspiring gangster Jason, this week's Pop Screen argues that Antonia Bird's 1997 movie Face deserves more credit. A British gangster movie made in that brief moment before Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels inspired every screenwriter in the country to write a gangster movie, it's a brutal postmorte...

There's always been a steady stream of British acts trying to make it in America, but the American acts trying to make it over here are a more rarefied bunch. Along with Sparks, one of the few US artists to try their hand at the notably Brit-centric early '70s glam rock scene was Suzi Quatro, who arrived with an unforgettable image, a massive bass guitar and some songs you'll know even if you don'...

We're doing a Madonna movie! No, come back! This week, Graham and Sarah go back to the Material Girl's breakthrough moment, when her Nile Rogers-produced sophomore album Like a Virgin proved she wasn't a fluke, and Desperately Seeking Susan became one of the top five highest grossing films of 1985. But don't think this is a safe choice for a young pop star: it's a screwball comedy, a tough genre t...