Eavesdropping at the Movies

A welcome new instalment in the Alien franchise, which has moved between genres and directors, remained popular for over four decades, and offered fascinating expansions of its internal mythos, Alien: Romulus moves with the times to give Generation Z the opportunity to die in space. It goes like the clappers, orchestrates loads of entertaining, tactile action, and is unbelievably good-looking. It'...

One of cinema's most infamous disasters, Caligula was conceived by producer Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, as an explicit, expensively-made adult film, about the rise and fall of the titular Roman emperor. In pursuing this, Guccione removed director Tinto Brass during post-production, so that he could have hardcore pornography shot and inserted into the film. On its release in 19...

Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn't have such an effect on us - even José found some things to compliment about it. Perhaps it's the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it ha...

After a long time off, we return with M. Night Shyalaman's new thriller, Trap, in which Josh Hartnett's doting dad, Cooper, takes his daughter to see her favourite pop star at a massive arena gig, but finds himself surrounded and hunted by the FBI. We discuss the ways in which Shyamalan gives Cooper opportunities for escape but closes them off; the unusually disappointing lack of imagination and e...

Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation of Dune makes its first appearance on the podcast in the form of the second film in the series - we saw the first when it came out but never podcasted on it. With the lore in place, the scene set, and the characters established, Dune: Part Two is free to develop romance, engage in action, and tell the story of the construction of a messiah. It's beautiful, exciti...

Wim Wenders finds inspiration in Japanese public lavatories in Perfect Days, a slice of life drama about Hirayama, a janitor who finds quiet happiness in his routine of travelling from public convenience to public convenience cleaning, photographing trees in the park, being welcomed at restaurants by proprietors who fetch him his usuals, and reading books before bed. We discuss Wenders' delicate t...

Writer-director Andrew Haigh's romantic fantasy, All of Us Strangers, flows beautifully from scene to scene, inviting the audience to question the reality of what they're shown but seldom requiring them to - it's about the feeling it creates. It's a film about isolation, building and rebuilding connections, how the past reverberates, and in particular, experiences of growing up gay in the homophob...

Is the world right, or is Mike? Argylle, Matthew Vaughn's new spy comedy, has received terrible reviews and is bombing at the box office - but Mike thinks everyone else is wrong, taking it far too seriously, and missing the parody. José is more in tune with the vox populi, finding the film a slog, Henry Cavill's hair ugly, and Bryce Dallas Howard ill-cast. But we find concord when it comes to the...

Writer-director Cord Jefferson's debut feature, American Fiction, combines satire with family dynamics to fairly charming, if visually uninspiring, effect. Jeffrey Wright's Thelonius is a novelist forced into a leave of absence from his teaching position, whereupon he returns to Boston and reconnects with his family, from whom he's distant. He's also furious that his latest manuscript has been rej...

We find Maestro, Bradley Cooper's latest actor-director star vehicle, which dramatises the life of iconic conductor Leonard Bernstein, to be dishonest, illustrative, and superficial Oscar bait. We also find it cinematically ambitious at times, with great production values - not many films of this type are being made with $80 million budgets. A mixed bag. Recorded on 1st February 2024.

Alexander Payne evokes the Seventies in form and aesthetic in The Holdovers, a comedy-drama about the students and staff forced to stay at a New England boarding school over Christmas. It exudes charm and, over time, warmth, as the frosty relationship between student and teacher thaws, Payne handles the meandering tone beautifully, and it's full of good jokes. For José, it doesn't quite reach the...

The Zone of Interest is a title that accurately reflects the film it adorns: it's a term used by the Nazis to euphemistically address the 40 square kilometre area surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp, conspicuously refusing to mention the factory of death it enclosed, conveying a culture of at best wilful ignorance of and at worst tacit complicity with the Holocaust. Similarly, Jonathan Gl...

As José describes, the Expendables films set Jason Statham up as the logical inheritor of the action hero crown formerly held by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and so on - and true to his status as such, Statham has many rubbish films under his belt. The Beekeeper is the latest, in which we learn of a programme of state-sponsored vigilantes - the Beekeepers - who act on their own terms, when...

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest absurd comedy, Poor Things, creates a wonderful confluence of themes, all through the lens of Bella, a grown woman with a child's brain, experiencing the world anew and detached from emotion. We discuss Bella's attitude to the world she encounters, the men who try to control and cage her, Lanthimos' idiosyncratic visual style and comedic sensibility, the examination of the...

Hot on the heels of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, which cast the titular rock & roll icon as the victim of a life controlled by his manager, comes Priscilla, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, which tells a similar story of a life controlled - but here, Elvis is the culprit. in 1959, 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets 24-year-old Elvis during his military service in West Germany; by 1963, she's move...

In 2002, Tony Leung and Andy Lau starred in the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese remade in the US as The Departed; twenty years on, the inspiration flows in the opposite direction, Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street a clear reference point for this fictionalised tale of real-life stock market manipulation, deeply embedded corruption, and the growth of a multi-billion-dolla...

Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, who has previously announced his retirement three times, tells us all that The Boy and the Heron (as it's titled in most of the world; How Do You Live? in Japan) is really, honestly, for real this time, I'm super serious, his last film. His longtime producer, Toshio Suzuki, has already cast doubt on this new claim, bu...

Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz star as lovers, business partners, and rivals, in a motorsport biopic that's much more about the drama off the track than on it. In 1939, Italian racing driver, team owner, and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari founded the car manufacturer that would become one of the best-known and most prestigious marques in history; Ferrari the film tells the story of events in 1957, with...

In something of a return to the sort of film that made his name, Taika Waititi co-writes and directs a quirky, charming comedy-drama set in Polynesia. Next Goal Wins adapts the true story of the American Samoan football team (and the 2014 documentary about it that gives this film its title), famously one of the worst teams on the planet, who begin the film in despair following their 31-0 world-rec...

A new, low-budget, Japanese-produced Godzilla movie takes us by surprise. Toho, with whom the series began in 1954 and who have produced over 30 Godzilla films since, have given Godzilla Minus One a wider release than usual, and we're glad of it. Unburdened by the lore and worldbuilding of the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse films, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki tells a story of Japan's post-Wor...

Paul King, the director of Paddington and Paddington 2, brings us Wonka, another reimagining of a British children's classic. Roald Dahl's beloved 1964 novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has been adapted twice: once in 2005 by Tim Burton, but most memorably in 1971 by Mel Stuart, with Gene Wilder as eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. It's from the 1971 version that Wonka takes some of its c...

Nicolas Cage plays a meme. Not just in real life any more, but now also in Dream Scenario, a quirky fantasy in the mould of Charlie Kaufman and Woody Allen, although nowhere near as funny. Cage's biology professor starts appearing in countless people's dreams for no obvious reason, blankly observing the events within, and soon becomes a minor celebrity - but as his presence in the dreams grows mor...

For our discussion of Ridley Scott's new historical epic, Napoleon, we have the privilege of being joined by Paul Cuff, a film historian and expert on the Napoleonic era in cinema, including and especially Abel Gance's Napoléon from 1927, about which he wrote A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon. Together, we ask whether Scott's film has anything to say about the man whose life it de...

David Fincher's precise, controlled direction is a perfect match for Michael Fassbender's precise, controlled performance in this lean but complex story of a botched assassination, revenge, and the hitman's attempts to reassert precise control over his life. We discuss the world in which The Killer is set and the way in which its title character operates, lives, and sees his place within it; the f...

Based on true events, Killers of the Flower Moon tells a story that invokes the foundational genocide upon which the USA was built, but has its own peculiarities. The Osage Nation, a Native American tribe and unusually the owners of their reservation in Oklahoma, became extraordinarily wealthy in the early 20th century upon finding their land gushing oil - but in pursuit of their riches, the white...