Eavesdropping at the Movies

It made Mike so physically uncomfortable that he had to go into hiding. It caught José up, to his surprise as much as anyone else's, in its wildness and visual design. It has to be seen to be believed. It can only be Cats. Recorded on 20th December 2019.

A beautifully observed, intelligently written and transparently played drama, Marriage Story shows the separation of two people with deep and ongoing love for each other, and how they change under the stress of their marriage breakup. Mike argues that it's an advert for therapy, the unread notes in which each partner describes what they love about the other, with which the film opens, returning st...

Luis Ospina, the influential Colombian filmmaker who died very recently, was last month the subject of an mini retrospective of his work by MUBI, who showed three of his films: Agarrando pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty (1977, co-directed by Carlos Mayolo), Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger (2008), and his final feature documentary, Todo comenzó por el fin/It All Started at the End (2015), and we're g...

Adam Driver and Annette Bening shine in writer-director Scott Z. Burns' historical drama The Report, about Senate staffer Daniel Jones and Senator Dianne Feinstein's work to investigate the CIA's use of torture after 9/11. Mike's been filling up on this stuff lately, quite by coincidence, watching old episodes of The Daily Show; José didn't even know what the film was about, and the difference in...

A truly deserved biopic, Harriet tells the story of the escaped slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who served as part of the Underground Railroad, undertaking several journeys to liberate around 70 slaves, and later serving as in the Union Army during the American Civil War (this latter part of her life forming the film's coda, as its focus is her escape to Philadelphia and rescue missions)...

A trip to the Mockingbird Cinema in the Custard Factory yields a massively hyped up and receptive audience of fat white blokes for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Mike is one of them, and he's never been harder to pick out of a lineup, laughing like a drain at the fan service and antics. José isn't, and he was already a bit too old for Kevin Smith when he emerged in the 90s, but he has almost as good a...

Writer-director Rian Johnson's playful, knockabout whodunnit Knives Out has been receiving praise for its screenplay that we feel isn't quite warranted, and isn't much to look at either - but it's a lark, and one that carries some unexpected sociopolitical commentary. José argues that Johnson doesn't learn enough from the films upon which his pastiche is based, making too little of both the wonder...

Cars, business, and a big chummy Brummie combine in 1960s California as Ford sets itself the mission of beating the all-conquering Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, in a film that has not one but two boring titles: Ford v Ferrari in the USA, and Le Mans '66 in the UK. Mike had a good enough time to see it twice, even though it's directed by James Mangold, for whom he has little lo...

This year's Screening Rights Film Festival saw a great start with Permission, an Iranian film about women's rights, oppression, and male ego, based on the true story of Niloufar Ardalan, the captain of the Iranian women's futsal team whose husband barred her from leaving the country to play in an international final. After the film, José led a discussion with Riham Sheble and Dr. Saeed Zeydabadi-N...

A three-and-a-half-hour epic in his signature genre, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman looks back on the life of a gangster, hitman, enforcer, and WWII veteran, who loses everything. There's a familiar tone to much of the film, Scorsese getting the gang back together - Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel are wonderful to see, but perhaps the most enjoyable performance comes from Joe Pesci, his Russ a ca...

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn't very good. Recorded on 15th November 2019.

Comparisons to Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies are inescapable in Alejandro Landes' captivating Monos, about a group of teenage soldiers, stationed on a Colombian mountaintop, whose relationships and leadership break down during a descent into the jungle. We think about its central imagery, Mike arguing that one image above all speaks for the film as a whole, and its allegorical qualities, Jo...

Returning to Newcastle after shining his coruscating lens on the inhumanity of the benefits system in I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach now casts his eye on the gig economy and the exploitation of workers in Sorry We Missed You. A struggling dad and husband gets a job as a delivery driver, coerced into handling unfair responsibility and meeting impossible targets, with the stability of his family bearing...

A horror film that everyone knew about when Mike was a teenager, but nobody seemed to have seen, we finally see 1998's Ring - or Ringu, to transliterate the Japanese title. It's been beautifully restored in 4K and we were keen to see what all the fuss was about. And, truthfully, we're left still asking that. Its influence is obvious, Mike suggesting that alongside 1999's The Blair Witch Project it...

Shot in black and white on a clockwork camera from the 1970s, the hand-development of its 16mm film resulting in scratches and unpredictable changes in exposure, and its soundtrack entirely post-synchronised, Mark Jenkin's Bait is audiovisually suffused with atmosphere and texture, and not a little dreamlike and weird to boot. It tells the story of Martin, a Cornish fisherman struggling to cope wi...

Gemini Man lacks charm, wit, originality, intelligence, any real sense of understanding how to shoot action... but it's a technological showcase, and with 3D glasses on, sat in a cinema with a 60fps projector (120fps screenings, the film's native frame rate, are nigh-on impossible to come by), it provides a certain pleasure. We agree that the high frame rate, so widely criticised in Peter Jackson'...

It's enormously disappointing that Neither Wolf Nor Dog is as bad as it is, because its subject - Native American life in a society built upon a land that was taken from them, and the pain, grievances and stories that the displaced people carry with them - is massively, conspicuously underrepresented in US cinema and demands to be explored. Unfortunately, although the story on which it is based is...

Neither of us has ever seen classic British thriller Don't Look Now before, though we're keenly aware of the esteem in which it is held. And it's fair to say that we're blown away by the expressive visual design and editing style, though Mike at first admits to a certain degree of nonplussedness - a film's reputation for greatness can often result in a dampened experience when it is finally encoun...

José reminisces about Judy Garland as a feature of his childhood, a constant presence on his family's television, and as a person who took on different significance to him as he grew up. Whether he admits it or not, he's been keen to see Judy since the trailers first appeared. Mike, predictably, neither knows much about her nor cares, although he has seen The Wizard of Oz about a thousand times. T...

A captivating performance from Matthias Schoenaerts as a long-time inmate in a Nevada prison gives The Mustang its heart and emotional centre. The story of an isolated man finding the ability to open up through a relationship he develops with a wild horse isn't going to win any awards for originality and is pretty one-note, but has its pleasures, and is an easy watch. Writer-director Laure de Cler...

In the mid-Seventies, Argentina was terrorised by the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), a far-right death squad that disappeared countless people, and it is under this regime of fear and death that Rojo is set - with 1976's military coup on the horizon. Disappearance is one of the film's major themes and gives it its central structure: Dario Grandinetti's Claudio, a lawyer, has an alter...

The Birmingham chapter of the Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society shows a few of their films every year at the mac, and this year sees them screen two shorts, Twice Two (1933) and County Hospital (1932), followed by their classic Western feature, Way Out West (1937). We discuss Laurel and Hardy's style, Mike comparing it favourably to cartoons and less favourably to the likes of Charlie Chaplin...

It's as though we've seen two different films, with José bowled over by Joker's social commentary, Mike bored and annoyed by its perceived self-satisfaction - not to mention an audience that applauded at the end. Joaquin Phoenix's Joker is explored to be a product of an uncaring, broken society that reaps in him what it sows, in a 1981 Gotham City that is the New York City of the era in all but na...

Donald Trump's vision of Mexico as America's terrifying, criminal neighbour to the south finds a home in Rambo: Last Blood, a film in which a journey to Mexico is no less than a descent into Hell, and the comfort of the USA means a ranch, horses, sunsets, and a subterranean network of tunnels in which to viciously trap and slaughter Mexican rapists. You may be surprised to hear that we weren't tha...

Ideologically hideous and cinematically not even trying... we hate Downton Abbey. Hate it. But José especially so. Recorded on 29th and 30th September 2019.