Couple Indemnity

Hal has returned to his love for Frank Capra this week and has chosen one of the most important political dramas from Hollywood history with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), about a naive, newly appointed and idealistic United States senator (James Stewart) who fights against government corruption.  Director: Frank Capra

Izzy has picked out one of her childhood and early teen Rom Com favourites in Legally Blonde, the story of fashionable sorority queen Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) who follows her ex-boyfriend to law school, where she discovers that there is more to her than just looks. Will Hal be just as enamoured and as unrestrained in his praise for this early 2000's female classic movie as Izzy? Listen to fi...

Hal is returning to one of his old favourite murder mystery shows set in the rural murderous world of Midsomer with the 2001 episode of Tainted Fruit with another case for  Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby (John Nettles) and Sergeant Troy (Daniel Casey). Melissa Townsend (Lucy Punch), the daughter of the manor, has been accused of causing the death of a local poacher and has received a number of...

Izzy has selected the 1984 Best Picture Academy Award Winner Amadeus as her selection this week, the depiction of the life, success and troubles of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), as told by Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), the contemporaneous composer who was deeply jealous of Mozart's talent and claimed to have murdered him. Director: Milos Forman

Hal is back with the next in the series of his favourite Hitchcock films starring Jane Wyman & Marlene Dietrich. Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is wanted by the police who suspect him of killing his lover's husband. His friend Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) offers to hide him and Jonathan explains to her that his lover, actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) is the real murderer. Eve decides to in...

Izzy's next choice is yet another Paul Thomas Anderson film with Phantom Thread (2017), a extraordinary portrait of renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the center of British fashion in 1950s London -- dressing royalty, movie stars, heiresses, socialites and debutantes. Women come and go in Woodcock's life, providing the confirmed b...

Hal has chosen an iconic Hollywood Classic comedy film Some Like it Hot about two musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) during the prohibition era who disguise themselves as women to escape Chicago mobsters they witnessed commit murder.  Director: Billy Wilder "And where did you get that phoney accent? Nobody talks loike that!"

Izzy has gone big for her next choice with Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 epic period drama starring Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman as he embarks on a ruthless quest for wealth during the Californian oil boom during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Hal has selected another of his British comedy favourites from the 1950's with Too Many Crooks, a highly amusing spoof on crime films, portraying four would-be criminals who manage to botch every job they plan. When they try to rob wealthy Billy Gordon (Terry-Thomas) they fail again. But the gang decides to kidnap his daughter. What can go wrong? Director: Mario Zampi

For Izzy's choice this week, she's selected the brand-new release of the Gothic Horror remake Nosferatu, a story we are very familiar with having recently watched the silent 1920's Classic in the cinema and recorded for our Halloween episode. The film stars Bill Skarsgard as the vampire Nosferatu and Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp as the married Hutter couple, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Co...

Hal has selected an absolute corker for this week's episode by choosing Boogie Nights (1997) a crazy Hollywood drama set in 1970's San Fernando Valley and focus on a young nightclub dishwasher (Mark Wahlberg) who becomes a popular star of pornographic films, chronicling his rise in the Golden Age of Porn in the latter part of the decade into the wild excesses of the 1980's.  Director: Paul Thomas...

Izzy is kicking off the New Year of 2025 with one of her favourites from recent years that is the latest adaptation of Little Women, the classic story set in the years after the Civil War: Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) lives in New York and makes her living as a writer, while her sister Amy (Florence Pugh) studies painting in Paris. Amy has a chance encounter with Theodore, a childhood crush who propos...

For the final podcast of the year, Hal has selected one of his British comedy favourites of the 1950's The Green Man, starring Alastair Sim playing a professional contract killer who, with his assistant, plan the murder of a prominent businessman (Raymond Huntley). The murder is scheduled to take place during the businessman's stay at a seaside hotel. However a salesman (George Cole) and his new f...

Izzy has selected one of Hal's all-time favourite films in the festive classic It's a Wonderful Life where an angel (Henry Travers) is sent from Heaven to help a desperately frustrated businessman (James Stewart) by showing him what life would have been like if he had never existed.  Director: Frank Capra

Hal has gone very left-field for his first festive film choice as he has selected the much-maligned Home Alone 3, and why it is a sequel that should carry a far superior reputation than it does.  In the third installment in the film franchise, with an all-new cast of actors, Alex Pruitt, an 8-year-old boy living in Chicago, must fend off four international criminals who are seeking a top-secret mi...

It's the beginning of our festive film season and for Izzy's first Christmas choice she has gone for award-winning The Holdovers (2023), a 70's tale of a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a New England prep school remains on campus during Christmas break to babysit a handful of students with nowhere to go. He soon forms an unlikely bond with a brainy but damaged troublemaker (Dominic Sess...

Hal has returned to his Hitchcock marathon for his next selection by choosing Rope (1948), the classic psychological crime thriller portraying two men who try to convince themselves they've committed the perfect murder by hosting a dinner party after strangling a former classmate to death. Director: Alfred Hitchcock 

Izzy has gone big this week and selected a true war epic in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), portraying a squad of U.S. Army soldiers on a perilous assignment behind enemy lines. The mission: to risk their lives to save the life of one man, paratrooper James Ryan. Ryan is the last survivor of a family of four brothers, the rest of whom have been killed in action.  Director: Steven Sp...

Hal has selected Steven Spielberg's feature film debut this week Duel (1971), a road-action thriller centred on a travelling salesman David Mann (played by Dennis Weaver) driving his car through rural California to meet a client. However, he finds himself chased and terrorized by the mostly unseen driver of a pursuing truck. 

For a special cinema interactive viewing, we took a trip to the Prince Charles Cinema to watch the highly influential silent horror German film Nosferatu, that tell the story of the mysterious Count Orlok (Max Schreck) who summons Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen. After Or...

Izzy has selected a film full of childhood nostalgia for her with Casper (1995) which follows the title character who peacefully haunts a mansion called Whipstaff Manor, meeting and befriending a teenage girl named Kat Harvey (Christina Ricci), the daughter of Dr. James Harvey (Bill Pullman), a paranormal therapist who is hired to move into Whipstaff in order to rid the mansion of its spectral inh...

Hal's gone a bit left-field again for his next Spooktober choice, and he's picked out a classic BBC adaptation of an equally classic ghost story about a skeptical professor on vacation in Norfolk who finds a cursed whistle, starring Michael Hordern.  Director: Jonathan Miller "Do you believe in Ghosts Professor?"

Izzy's first official selection for Spook-tober is the Oscar-sweeping The Silence of the Lambs (1991) featuring Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee who is hunting a serial killer named "Buffalo" Bill, who skins his female victims. To catch him, she seeks the advice of the imprisoned Hannibal Lector (memorably played by Anthony Hopkins), a former psychiatrist and cannibalistic ser...

We are back for the first episode of Spooktober (Spooky Season oooohh) and Hal has gone straight in and selected one of his all-time favourite Horror movies with the anthology Ealing classic Dead of Night (1945) starring Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave and Googie Withers as guests invited to a weekend in the country share their supernatural stories, beginning with Walter Craig (Johns), who sense im...

Izzy is back with a real treat this week as she has chosen the 2005 Stop-Motion animation comedy film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as Wallace and his loyal dog, Gromit, set out to discover the mystery behind the garden sabotage that plagues their village and threatens the annual giant vegetable growing contest. Featuring Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes & Helena Bonham Carter...