Eavesdropping at the Movies

Upon revisiting our podcast on the previous entry in the Harry Potter-adjacent Fantastic Beasts series, The Crimes of Grindelwald, we find that we could virtually have copied and pasted its content for our discussion of The Secrets of Dumbledore. It's again less than the sum of its parts, a fantasy adventure with some charms, several good performances, but incoherent storytelling, and too little t...

Sony's Spider-Man Universe has given us a charming Venom origin story, a rather less charming Venom sequel, and now another film about a well-intentioned man inadvertently possessed by something that demands he feed on humans. In Morbius, Jared Leto's brilliant scientist finds a cure for the blood disease that has tormented him and his best friend throughout their lives - except that it comes with...

Director Adrian Lyne, who made the Eighties his erotic, thrilling playground with Flashdance, 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, returns with the erotic thriller Deep Water, his first film in twenty years. Repeatedly delayed and eventually denied a cinema release due to COVID, it's available on Hulu in the US and Amazon Prime everywhere else, and is easy to recommend - until the last act kicks in. Jos...

A Palme d'Or-nominated millennial comic drama from Norway, whose lead, Renate Reinsve, won Best Actress at Cannes last year, The Worst Person in the World explores universal themes of how to find a direction in life, our expectations of our own lives and others', falling in and out of love, and how to handle the twists that life throws our way. But it speaks to José and Mike differently. To the ol...

Referential and reverential of classic slashers from decades past, Ti West's X is likely just the sort of thing the dedicated horror fan wants to see - but to Mike, it's a pretty unsophisticated and tedious imitation of much better films, and to José, it's unpleasant, racist, sexist, and ageist. But on the plus side, no film has made him - a man who is decidedly not delighted by being frightened -...

In the high-concept mould of Speed and Unstoppable, Michael Bay's Ambulance gives us an ambulance, hijacked by bank robbers, that isn't allowed to stop moving. It's a real throwback to the era of genuine stunts, cars flipping over on fire, helicopters flying under bridges, and charismatic villains - with much less charm than you'd like, insultingly mechanical use of archetypes to manipulate your f...

The latest in a long line of Batman reboots, The Batman claims the definite article for itself - and deserves to. Richly shot, dark, romantic expressiveness spilling from every frame, The Batman leans in hard on bringing the noir of the source material to the screen with unabashed sincerity. It's the best Batman film of them all. Recorded on 15th March 2022.

The latest in a long line of star-studded adaptations of Agatha Christie's murder mysteries, Death on the Nile sinks without trace under the weight of Kenneth Branagh's all-consuming ego. Failing to understand that one of the pleasures of such films is the attention given to the impressive cast, he instead gives his focus entirely to his own performance as Poirot, engaging in mythmaking and heroic...

Having gone through fourteen years of development hell, the first of Sony's planned videogame adaptations arrives - Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, turns the famously cinematic action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving games into surprisingly enjoyable action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving cinema. Well, "famously" is relative - Uncharted is an enormously successful blockbuster s...

As Birmingham's Electric reopens following a protracted period of uncertainty as to whether it was gone for good, it turns to a programme of classics to invigorate its audience. We catch The Apartment there, Billy Wilder's dark romantic comedy, which Mike has never seen and José not for years, to discuss corporate alienation, whether the suicide story structure works, the cynicism in Wilder's work...

Kenneth Branagh writes and directs a drama based on his own childhood in Belfast, at the time the Troubles began. We discuss the portrayal of a happy family, the lack of effect almost every visual decision has, problems with the storytelling, and the nostalgia that runs throughout the film. It's not a skilful film, but it is a likeable one. Recorded on 3rd February 2022.

We explore 1947's Nightmare Alley, directed by Edmund Goulding, and compare it to Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of the material, which we find superior in almost every way. Mike in particular finds, in the reflection of Goulding's version, useful ways to appreciate del Toro's, which at first blush he found uninspiring. We discuss the portrayal and use of the geek, the differences in the intr...

We talk swoony visuals, alcoholism, a femme fatale pastiche, moral descent, Bradley Cooper's sexual presence and more in our discussion of Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel of the same name. Recorded on 21st January 2022.

José gives Mike a history lesson on the Spanish Civil War, the scars it left on Spanish culture and society, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's own relationship to it and the dictatorship to which it led, under which he grew up and which fell in the few years prior to his ascent to prominence. His new film, Parallel Mothers, inspires this review of the past, embroiled as it is in confronting Spain's...

We talk feminism, body horror, monsters, trans tropes, masculinity and more in our discussion of writer-director Julia Ducournau's shocking, transgressive, and surprising Titane. Recorded on 13th January 2022.

We're remotely joined by filmmaker, previous guest, and, crucially, Mike's brother, Stephen Glass, for a discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson's period romance, Licorice Pizza. Stephen last helped us explore Anderson's previous film, Phantom Thread, and again brings his knowledge of and passion for the director's work to our discussion. We consider the efficiency with which Anderson creates rich port...

Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut feature as a director, The Lost Daughter, paints a powerful portrait of Leda, a middle-aged woman for whom motherhood never came naturally, and whose exposure to a young family on holiday ferociously reminds her of her experience of raising two daughters. It's a film that bravely and forcefully repudiates the notion that motherhood should be natural to women, the key expe...

We talk subverted expectations, how an artificial performance makes sense on a character who's pretending to be something he's not, the way in which forty years of oppression eats into a person's soul, rejection of familial expectations and the performance of unspoken fraternal duty, and more, in our discussion of Jane Campion's fascinating, complex, and beautiful drama, The Power of the Dog. Reco...

We've enjoyed Adam McKay's previous couple of films, The Big Short and Vice, in which he dramatises real events in a pointed, opinionated, satirical manner. He now brings the same attitude to the apocalypse, painting a picture of a world in which an asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, poised to end the human race's existence unless something is done... and nobody cares. We debate...

Paolo Sorrentino reaches into his childhood to tell a story that's in equal parts comic and tragic, with access to the off-kilter and fabulistic, in The Hand of God - whose title references that infamous goal scored by Diego Maradona, who Sorrentino semi-seriously credits with saving his life - as he dramatises here. We discuss the imagery, the familial banter, the curious opening scene, choosing...

After eighteen years away and vast changes in the blockbuster landscape in which it once broke incredible new ground, the Matrix series is back with a fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections. Keanu Reeves' Neo is once again plugged into the Matrix as Thomas Anderson, but having trouble separating reality from dreams of events that happened twenty years ago... if dreams are what they are. We discuss...

Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story is here at last. The obvious question it raises is just why such a well-regarded film needs a remake - and the answer quickly becomes clear. Robert Wise's 1961 adaptation of the 1957 stage musical is indeed a classic, but this new version comes from and enters a different America, one in which its message, José argues, is more urgently needed but faces...

In 1975, caring for her infant son and unable to spend much time away from home, Agnès Varda turned her camera on her neighbours on her street, Rue Daguerre in Paris. In Daguerréotypes - the title a pun on the photographic process for whose inventor the road is named - she both observes them at work, running their shops and providing their services, and asks them questions about their lives, disco...

A true story of love, ambition, passion, betrayal, and retribution, House of Gucci is entertaining, interesting, and beautifully played... so why isn't it good enough? We discuss its lack of seriousness of purpose, its failure to express itself with visual flair and use the camera to show us things we really need to see, and how it would have benefitted from giving Lady Gaga's Patrizia the unambig...

As he did with 2016's Jackie, director Pablo Larraín explores the life, image, and legacy of a woman publicly struck by tragedy in Spencer, a fabulistic biopic that imagines a Christmas holiday spent with the royal family at Sandringham, during which Princess Diana struggles with the knowledge of her husband's affair and the watchful eyes of both the royals and the paparazzi. We discuss our own re...