Eavesdropping at the Movies

A film many have heard of and few have seen, Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's infamous difficult second album. Six years after his eventual cult hit Donnie Darko, this sprawling, confusing mess of an end-of-days parable was released to thunderous bafflement and almost no box office. We dive in and find that perhaps all we needed was to give it thirteen years to breathe. There's n...

A prototypical screwball comedy, 1934's Twentieth Century sees John Barrymore delightfully chewing the scenery as a pompous theatre impresario who discovers and makes a star of Carole Lombard's lingerie model. Having separated after several successful years, the former power couple meet by chance on the luxury Twentieth Century train, and it all kicks off as schemes are put into action, conflict e...

A 62-minute-long, 1940 B-movie whose director you haven't heard of and whose top-billed star has barely ten minutes of screen time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Stranger on the Third Floor is nothing remarkable, but its reputation precedes it: Here we behold, if the legends are true, the first film noir. José, a lover of noir, both likes and dislikes this line. On the one hand, it enjoyably...

We conclude our dalliance with Jean-Pierre Melville with 1970's Le Cercle rouge, a heist film with an impressive cast of Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. We discuss how genre conventions operate in the film - the shortcuts an understanding of genre provides allow details to make the difference, Mike suggesting that it all comes out through character relationships and quirks. In d...

Jean-Pierre Melville draws upon his experiences in the French Resistance for 1969's Army of Shadows, which depicts an ensemble including Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse working to disrupt the Nazi occupation of France, rescuing Resistance members from captivity, operating safehouses... and killing informants. Army of Shadows' view of the Resistance is far from romantic, showing the...

We visit another Melville, 1963's Le Doulos, about a network of criminals searching for an informer in their midst. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays his thief with such assuredly French swagger that it's no wonder why Quentin Tarantino names this film as a significant influence, though we also pick up on the story's similarity to Reservoir Dogs, in particular the botched robbery and snitch mystery. The fi...

Jean-Pierre Melville's final film, Un flic (A Cop), has a bleak feel, its characters isolated amongst harsh architecture and the neverending business of cops and robbers. Alain Delon's cop follows the trail of Richard Crenna's thief, whilst handling informants, other cases, and an occasional relationship with Catherine Deneuve. It's a film in which feeling shows through small actions, glances, and...

Hollywood action in the Eighties was a world unto itself, and we look back on two specimens of one of the genre's icons, Arnold Schwarzenegger. One a delightful, over-the-top romp, the other a macho, moody sci-fi, we compare and contrast Commando and Predator. We're in agreement that Predator is the better film, but that Commando offers the better time. José describes this era as his awakening to...

A political parable, satire, thriller, high-concept actioner, horror, and Western all at once, 2019 Cannes Jury Prize winner Bacurau is a wild experience and well worth your time. Set in a tiny, remote village in a near-future Brazil, we're given a portrait of life within an open, tolerant community under the thumb of a distant but powerful mayor, and shortly after the funeral of one of the town's...

We may be living under lockdown conditions, but no virus can stop us, and to prove it we're taking on Steven Soderbergh's 2011 thriller Contagion, about a virus that rips through every country on Earth, the scientific work to stop it, and the social decay that it leaves in its wake. Suggested as a podcast by an irony-seeking Mike, it backfires as it actually just frightens him. At least, for a whi...

A delicate, intelligent love story, Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire undulates with complex, interlocking themes and emotions. It's a film about looking: who looks, who is looked at, how one should be seen, for whom the gaze is intended and what the rules are. Héloïse, a young aristocrat, refuses to have her portrait painted for the approval of a Milanese nobleman; an artist named Maria...

A legal drama about the biggest corruption scandal you've never heard of, Dark Waters tells the story of lawyer Robert Bilott's twenty year long fight to expose chemical manufacturer DuPont's decades of knowing and unapologetic poisoning of a town, a country, and the entire world. Visited by a West Virginian farmer named Wilbur Tennant, whose livestock are falling prey to unusual medical condition...

An assured debut feature from director Melina Matsoukas, Queen & Slim is a romantic, fugitive road movie with a state-of-the-nation feel. After an awkward first date, a traffic stop escalates out of hand, resulting in one dead police officer, shot in self defence, and two black civilians on the run. Their escape sees them take a tour through Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana and Florida, their public prof...

The latest winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's American Factory is a complex and brilliant examination of a clash of cultures and management styles and the diminishment of a class of workers having to grovel for jobs they cannot do without. In 2014, the recently closed GM factory in Moraine, Ohio, was acquired and reopened by Fuyao Glass, a...

Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, a tale of two lighthouse keepers stranded during a storm, is a visual treat in black and white that stuns and engrosses us. A two-hander between Willem Dafoe's irascible boss and Robert Pattinson's secretive youngster, it invokes myth, gods, folk tales, the clash of male egos, compulsive psychosexuality, if not much, much more besides. If its plot is simple, its stor...

It's one of José's films of the year; it leaves Mike cold. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite depicts social inequality in South Korea through a lower-class family that cons its way into working for an upper-class family. We pick our way through the film's structure; its motif of staircases that delineate status and power relations; the way poverty carries with it an inescapable smell, intolerable to the upp...

Trying to build a portrait of patriarchal power and subjugation that shapes the lives of five women, Birds of Prey takes a solid enough foundation and executes it abysmally, lacking visual style, coherent storytelling, and really any imagination. It's the worst time José's endured at the cinema in a year; Mike heroically offers a couple of examples of moments he enjoyed - the flying sandwich - but...

Independent filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie team up with Adam Sandler for Uncut Gems, an energetic, evolving crime thriller set in Manhattan's Diamond District. By the time we meet Sandler's Jewish jeweller, Howard, he's already embedded within a web of competing interests, desires and debts, as well as a gambling addiction - and the tension only mounts as problems grow worse. The Safdie brothers...

The film that wants to make us feel bad for people who worked at Fox News, Bombshell casts former stars Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson as heroines fighting the revolting, crude, institutional sexism of their former place of work. It refuses to do so with any complexity, any suggestion that they were anything but victims - that they had all the opportunity to say no to the hideous deal they were...

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...