Eavesdropping at the Movies

The sequel to the best Marvel film by far has to deal with tragic circumstances - the star of the first, Chadwick Boseman, died at the age of 43 in 2020. His role was not recast; instead, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows us the funeral of his character, T'Challa, and his sister, Shuri's, difficulty in dealing with his death. Letitia Wright, playing Shuri, has primarily been a source of comic r...

We wanted to like Bros more. Co-writer and star Billy Eichner jumped at the chance to expand the boundaries of the wide-release Hollywood rom-com to tell the story of a gay romance and give representation to people who are usually marginalised, if included at all, in mainstream comedy, and whose inclusion is often at their expense. It's a shame, then, that it's dull, uncreative, flat, comedically...

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, best known in cinema for his breakthrough comedy-drama In Bruges and, most recently, the critical and financial success of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, on which we podcasted twice, reunites with the stars of the former for an exploration of a male friendship, its dissolution, and the subsequent fallout. The Banshees of Inisherin offers someth...

We indulge in a caper inspired by a real-life attempted overthrow of the US government - no, not that one. The Business Plot of 1933 was alleged to have been planned by business leaders, aggrieved by Franklin D. Roosevelt's election, who sought to remove him and install a retired major general as dictator, and in telling a loose version of this story, writer-director David O. Russell chucks in a d...

Trauma as metaphor has become a trope of horror in recent years, and Smile features it more bluntly than you've ever seen. We discuss its messaging, storytelling, and camerawork, and remark upon the ways in which 2014's It Follows may have inspired it. In the sense of Ali Baba and the Forty People Who Were Inspired. Recorded on 16th October 2022.

Don't Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde's second feature as director, after Booksmart, which we loved, is an irredeemable mess of a psychological thriller. We pick through its carcass in an attempt to figure out which bit of it we liked the least. Recorded on 9th October 2022.

The absence of presence that is Idris Elba, who we'd like to like one day, stars in Beast, a Jurassic Park knock-off that pitches him against both his distant daughter and an excessively affectionate lion. It's a film that Mike enjoyed unironically but can't claim to find much quality in; José, showing off, provides a coherent response, seeing the film's weaknesses and having no fun. It's a mechan...

Nope, Jordan Peele's third film as writer-director, following his zeitgeist-capturing Get Out and complex, ambitious Us, invites its audience to speculate on audiences and spectacle. The kinds of things it wants us to think about are clear, and we discuss its themes of commercialised tragedy, fear of the audience, and photography as truth, among others - but what it has to say about them is at bes...

David Leitch, who directed the surprisingly enjoyable Hobbs & Shaw, delivers another surprisingly enjoyable action comedy. Bullet Train is set upon the eponymous Japanese train, which, for two hours, hosts an assortment of assassins getting into scraps and scrapes at the behest of their various employers. It's stylish, funny, smart, and features a wonderful central comic presence from Brad Pitt, w...

We visit the MAC for a screening of the new 4k restoration of Psycho, one of the most analysed films of all time, and arguably director Alfred Hitchcock's most famous. It's a film we've both seen several times, but not for a few years, and in the cinema setting for which it's meant, instead of the classroom, there's a renewed and reinvigorated wonder to its imagery and editing. We share our feelin...

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is here: a colourful, expressive telling of the story of Elvis Presley, through the eyes of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who opens the film by claiming that he's not the villain he's renowned to have been. But the film flattens any complexities in the history it tells so thoroughly that we have no option but to continue to see him as one. Still, it starts vibrantly and exc...

We're into the land of diminishing returns with Marvel, it seems, with the novelty of a shared cinematic universe having worn off and the big storyline everything was building to for ten years now over. Of course, another big event is sure to be on its way in another decade, but will we care by then? Not if Thor: Love and Thunder is anything to go by. Between the thinning appeal of Taika Waititi's...

A one-off experience visits Birmingham's Electric Cinema: The Afterlight, an 82-minute collage assembled from footage in which every person in frame is now dead. Director Charlie Shackleton accompanies the film on its tour, not only to give post-screening Q&A sessions, but also because he is in possession of the only copy of the film in existence - a single 35mm print that gradually degrades with...

Alex Garland's Men is as blunt as its title, with nothing of the profundity it would like to think it possesses. It's slow and boring, too. Very pretty though. Well done to the cinematographer. Recorded on 6th June 2022.

Top Gun is back after a mere 36 years away. We talk Tom Cruise's unusual longevity as a star, the ways in which this sequel uses and develops its predecessor's plots and characters, the direction and editing of the action, and how Maverick has become Obi-Wan Kenobi. Recorded on 5th June 2022.

Problematic and protested against upon its release in 1980, and remaining so today, Dressed to Kill is nonetheless stylish and engrossing, showing off some truly great filmmaking. We talk Psycho and cinema's transgender villains, why Nancy Allen should have been a star, Brian De Palma's greatest deaths, and the version of Michael Caine that José doesn't like. Recorded on 2nd June 2022.

The Italian Job is a classic British caper familiar to everyone who's grown up in the UK, so often has it been shown on telly and so embedded in British culture is the iconography of the red, white and blue Minis, the chase through Turin, only being supposed to blow the bloody doors off, and of course, the cliffhanger. Even those who, like Mike, have never watched it from beginning to end, know an...

Returning guest Celia joins us from Canada to discuss the 1970s Tyneside noir of Get Carter, a moody story of a man's investigation into his brother's death that's today considered a classic of British cinema. We discuss its setting in Newcastle, Michael Caine's stardom, the influence of its director, Mike Hodges, along with two other British directors, on Hollywood aethetics, its use of women, an...

Flatpack Festival and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery are running a marvellous exhibition until 30th October 2022: Wonderland tells stories of filmgoing and cinema culture in Birmingham. It begins with the earliest days of cinematic experimentation, including a visit from Eadweard Muybridge to demonstrate his moving images, through the glory days of the picture palaces in the 1930s and 40s, the in...

Gaspar Noé dials down his typical cinematic spectacle to bring us a slow and moving exploration of dementia and how it drives a loving couple apart. He still has one visual trick up his sleeve, however: Vortex uses splitscreen to show us two lives lived in close proximity but not shared. His cameras follow their subjects individually, sometimes observing them go about separate activities, sometime...

We've seen a lot of the multiverse lately, and Everything Everywhere All at Once brings to it a combination of Gen Z existential angst and mid-life where-did-things-go-wrong woe, in a frantic comic-action-sci-fi wrapper. It's a lot of things in one, and we discuss as many of them as we can remember, including its campness, puerility, basis in multi-generational immigrant life, film references, end...

Composer and musician Neil Brand brings a live show to the Electric Cinema as part of Flatpack Festival - Neil Brand Presents Laurel and Hardy is touring around the country, giving audiences a taste of Stan and Ollie's work before they were paired together, and showing us what their double act was like before the development of sound cinema. The show culminates in screenings of two of their silent...

Marvel's invasion of the multiverse is now well under way, and in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this dense network of alternate realities sets the stage for a race to save - what else? - the world. Which world? Dunno. Our world, the most important one, at least, but maybe all the others too. While director Sam Raimi has history with superhero movies, having helped to bring the genre...

If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is to be believed, CODA, a comedy-drama about the tension caused in a deaf family when the one child who can hear wishes to pursue a career in singing, is the best film of 2021. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not to be believed, and the fact that a straight-to-video Hallmark film can win the most prestigious award in cinema is...

Writer-director Robert Eggers, who previously wowed us with The Lighthouse, returns in style with a brutal, bloody Viking epic, based on Amleth, the figure in Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's the first of his films to see a wide, mainstream release and large-scale ad campaign to match, and it's perhaps for that reason that it is in some sense less demanding that its aud...