Eavesdropping at the Movies

The road to banal and disappointingly homophobic biopics of rock legends is, as they say, paved with good intentions. The Queen story/Freddie Mercury biopic has been in the works since 2010, with creative differences amongst the filmmakers made public and Brian May and Roger Taylor apparently exercising tight control over how the story would be told. What they apparently wanted was sanitised, bowd...

José falls in love with Widows, a portrait of life and survival in modern America in the skin of a heist film. Mike can see exactly why he should love it, but just doesn't click with it. Based on Lynda La Plante's 1983 ITV series of the same name, Widows sees three women lose their criminal husbands in a heist gone wrong, and their attempt to complete their final job with the promise of a big payo...

One of us has seen it countless times. The other has never seen it. Fortunately for José, Mike instantly falls in love with Casablanca. In a way, the pressure was on for Mike to enjoy it, as it's considered one of the greatest films of all time, and its screenplay in particular held up as a shining example of the craft. And how effortless it is to enjoy it! José notes how rare it is in cinema to s...

Commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Peter Jackson was approached by 14-18 NOW and the Imperial War Museum to make use of their extensive archive of wartime footage. He responded to the call by performing significant alterations to it, including colourisation and conversion to 3D, hoping to present it afresh and help modern audiences feel closer to the war it documents. It's been a...

We pick at flaw after flaw in a film we sincerely enjoyed! Drew Goddard's post-noir, post-Tarantino, post-Hitchcock thriller is an oddball, a delightfully playful collection of stories about secrets and regrets and temptations and damage. A fabulous ensemble cast is split up and paired off in all sorts of ways, histories are exposed, deception is currency, violence is brutal and shocking. And it a...

A weird failure, as Mike puts it, we struggle a little bit to get a read on First Man, Damien Chazelle's biopic of Neil Armstrong. Not content to adopt a mainstream tone, not willing to go full art movie, it gets lost in the middle somehow. Mike sees Armstrong as incongruously passive in his own story, his - and, for that matter, everyone else's - drive for the Moon light, not believable, ultimate...

Hyped up, already very successful, and widely well-received, A Star Is Born earns strong reactions from us. To Mike it's at points truly reprehensible, to José simply a confused failure. Mike has never seen any of the previous versions - he tried and couldn't make it - while José finds writer/director/star Bradley Cooper's new remake unworthy to share their company. The novelty of seeing Lady Gaga...

You find us in contemplative mood, picking apart a film described by José as "genuinely puzzling" and Mike as "The House with a Doc in Its Walls". The Little Stranger builds light gothic horror around class and ambition in 1940s Warwickshire, a stately home providing the setting of the action and focus of Domhnall Gleeson's town doctor. With some difficulty, we attempt to grasp the film's themes a...

With 99 podcasts under our belt at time of recording, we take the opportunity to look back and reflect. At Eavesdropping at the Movies we try to speak honestly about what we see and don't attach too much of a formula to our discussions. Our philosophy - yes, philosophy! - is to try to see films as unmolested by hype and expectation as we can, and to consider questions of aesthetics and individual...

Venom utterly charms the pants off us, its bizarre knockabout body horror surprising us with a great sense of humour and unexpected variations on the idea of a dweeb made more masculine. From the trailer, Mike was worried about the broadness of Tom Hardy's accent - actually, it's tonally perfect as broadness is exactly what the film is going for in every respect, in the very best way. Hardy is sup...

A group of dancers parties the night away, but someone has spiked the sangria with LSD. There are extraordinarily long takes, sex, drugs, violence, and horror. Yes, it's a Gaspar Noé film. Climax is a singular cinematic escape into a vision of Hell. Boy, there's a lot going on. We grapple with the film's themes of sex, violence, drugs, youth, dance, sexuality, nationality, culture, and whatever el...

"From the darker side of director Paul Feig", as the ubiquitous advertising has it, and the film doesn't disappoint. A Simple Favor pairs Anna Kendrick with Blake Lively as the least compatible friends you can imagine, friends with dark secrets and desires. We find Feig a complete master of tone, able to control the film's descent into some very, very murky places without ever losing its ability t...

We're disappointed with The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a children's horror fantasy that insults its audience's intelligence by assuming that this is the kind of simplistic shit kids love. We find some aspects of its design to enjoy but for the most part find it close to charm-free and not up to the standards of its stars - though Mike is keen to point out it's probably director Eli Roth's be...

First of all, huge thanks to the Electric Cinema in Birmingham for not only screening a preview of irresistible hangout flick Skate Kitchen, but for hosting a Q&A with director Crystal Moselle and some of the cast - not professional actors, but girls who genuinely hang out and skate in New York City under the name "Skate Kitchen", and whose daily lives form the basis of the film. A chance meeting...

A heist movie for the twinkly wrinklies, with a nostalgic and homophobic angle we disliked. Based on the true story of the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary, King of Thieves features an all-star British cast and one joke: they're all old. Mike is keen to give the film credit for its charm early on, as well as its sensitive depiction of the sense of loss felt by Michael Caine's recent widower. But the fi...

A contemporary Western played by non-professional actors and based closely on their real lives, The Rider is both heartfelt and riddled with cliché. Brady is one of a group of young men in the American Midwest who ride bucking horses and bulls, risking severe injury and death, in what can be seen at once as both a vital act of keeping tradition alive and a tacit admission that the opportunities of...

Cold War is Paweł Pawlikowski's follow up to the Academy Award winning Ida. We delighted in the Midlands Arts Centre’s fabulous projection system, which Mike says makes these beautifully lit and composed images "sing", allowing their poetry to resonate. The film is unashamedly a love story, framed in a 4:3 ratio that best frames faces and sharpens the focus on the feelings they express, in glisten...

An utterly charming, friendly rom-com set in and amongst the very wealthiest of the Singaporean elite, Crazy Rich Asians is also full of odd tensions and problematic complexities. In one sense a highly specifically Chinese story of a second-generation American immigrant's return to Asia and the conflict she experiences in negotiating her way into a world that finds her somewhat unwelcome; on the o...

An imperfect combination of documentary and dramatisation, American Animals gives us a lot to talk about. Its story of four college students embarking on a heist raises ideas of privilege, ambition and hope (or lack thereof), self-image, and above all, masculinity. In its self-conscious invocation of the kinds of films twenty-something white guys adore, such as Fight Club and Reservoir Dogs, Ameri...

Jump scares, a spooky castle, ghosts, nuns, and a demon. What a recipe. José decries the lack of internal logic. Mike embraces it. There's artistry in the visual and production design that the rest of the film doesn't live up to, but there's an audacity in the film's wackiness. Neither of us can recommend it, but we had loads of fun talking about it. Mike uses the word "creepy" about forty times....

You wait all day for a new type of film and then two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of Unfriended: Dark Web, which we discussed a few weeks ago, is Searching, another desktop film (as we're calling them). John Cho plays a father whose teenage daughter goes missing and conducts a search for her using her laptop and an old family PC. It's formally a little different from Unfriended, and we consid...

We catch up on home media with an erotic thriller that, while it fails to titillate, offers a fascinating portrayal of totalitarianism, sexuality, control and ownership of the female body and the way power is expressed through it, revenge, and more. Jennifer Lawrence stars as a ballet dancer forced into working for the state as a honeypot, tasked with seducing Joel Edgerton's CIA operative for the...

Raunchy, vulgar, adult puppet comedy. You'd think it'd be right up our street. But The Happytime Murders is incompetent, embarrassing and infantile, with almost no comic instinct - the couple of moments that drew laughs from us did so primarily through sheer insistence and excess. Mike tries to reckon with what the difference is between the likes of this and something like Team America: World Poli...

Quiet, meditative, sensitive, gradual. Not the first words that come to mind when considering 2014's vigilante thriller The Equalizer - though they do apply at times - but certainly descriptors of its sequel, which we loved. Denzel Washington's ex-spy, Robert McCall, who had managed to extricate himself from a life of state-sanctioned violence and murder, now works as a vigilante for hire, an aven...

It's Eavesdropping's first anniversary and we celebrate with a film Mike's been looking forward to seeing for almost a decade. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder was released at the tail end of the short-lived Fifties 3D craze, and has rarely been seen in that format (even at the time). But it rolls around every so often and this week came to the Electric, so we jumped at the chance to see it. A...