Eavesdropping at the Movies

A film of surprising delights - certainly for Mike, who hates anything that looks like it could appear on ITV - Mothering Sunday tells the story of one key 1924 day in the life of a young maid. It's a film filled with grief and lust, beautifully shot and featuring the best of British acting, Colin Firth and Olivia Colman's performances subtly modulated and multifaceted. It's imperfect, failing to...

The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson's love letter to The New Yorker, is, as you might expect, a charming way to pass a couple of hours - but not as funny or as tight as we might like, and certainly a disappointment in the light of his last two films, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs (although, in fairness, reaching those heights even twice, let alone a third time consecutively, would be a b...

Edgar Wright's highly anticipated psychological horror, Last Night in Soho, reaches cinemas, and we dive into its themes, its visual magnificence, its relationship to the era and environment it portrays... and its problems. It's impossible not to admire this film for its lush cinematography, impressive special effects, and the best of its performances, but its screenplay leaves a huge amount to be...

In a chilly outdoor screening at the Coffin Works in Birmingham, we indulge in Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic. José's seen it many times, Mike never in its entirety. We discuss how this 100-year-old film holds up today and still entertains a general audience, its differences from and similarities to Dracula, its source material, and more. Including how cold it was. Mik...

Don't believe the trailer, which gives a poor impression of what's in store: Ridley Scott's latest historical epic is lighter on the action than you'd expect, and, for a blockbuster, formally adventurous. Based on true events that took place in 14th century France, The Last Duel tells the story of a lifelong feud and a sexual assault... then it tells it again, and then once more. Three perspective...

Venom returns after his surprisingly enjoyable, if trashy, 2018 solo debut, but we don't find much of a way to have fun with this sequel. Its cast is underserved by both the direction and screenplay, Tom Hardy appears to want to be seen as a slob, there's not a memorable shot throughout, and most of the comedy, while promising in principle, falls flat. Mike asks where the real carnage even is, the...

Daniel Craig's Bond bids us goodbye in No Time to Die, the culmination of his fifteen-year tenure as the gentleman's spy - but is it really Bond? The character, and the films in which he appears, have changed in tone and attitude in recent years, in response to several factors, including criticisms of misogyny and the cinematic influence of the Bourne series, all of which results, for José, in a f...

We're joined by Dr. Ben Lamb of Teesside University, television scholar and Sopranos megafan, to discuss The Many Saints of Newark, the prequel to The Sopranos. Set in the 1960s and 1970s, it depicts a young Tony Soprano - played by James Gandolfini's son, Michael - and offers a portrait of the family, time, place and culture that shaped him, but focuses primarily on his uncle Dickie, to whom he l...

Aretha Franklin, an icon of American music, receives a dispiritingly by-the-numbers biopic in Respect, which takes this perfect subject for such a film and does nothing very interesting with her. We discuss, among other topics, the film's dependence on clichés, its poor lighting, Franklin's relationship with her father and upbringing in a prosperous household, Jennifer Hudson's performance in the...

The fairytale figure of the undine has been used and developed in the arts for two hundred years, and Christian Petzold, whose Transit we loved, brings his clear-eyed but sensitive aesthetic to it in Undine. Paula Beer plays the titular character with transparent emotion, in the opening scene regretfully informing her ex-boyfriend, as he dumps her, that she will have to kill him. It's a moment tha...

Based on the trailer, Mike was interested in The Night House, a horror film about a recently bereaved woman and the secrets she discovers her husband was keeping - but it took him a good third of the film's duration to remember why. It's an ugly film, one of the poorest-lit you're likely to see, and the culmination of its mystery is almost offensively stupid. José finds the thematic ground it cove...

A new day, a new entry in the MCU, and on this occasion we're introduced to an entirely new set of characters and mythos: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings fills us in on the history of a young Chinese-American man and his dad's magical jewellery. Like Doctor Strange and Black Panther, it's a film whose connection to the wider MCU is light, establishing characters, a setting, and story ele...

Benedict Cumberbatch gets himself embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis in The Courier, a dramatisation of the true story of Greville Wynne, a British businessman recruited by MI6 to smuggle Soviet secrets provided by high-ranking GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky. It's a film that offers pleasures in its performances and in the telling of a story you likely haven't heard, but its storytelling is often b...

Ryan Reynolds' schtick, so irritating for so long, is winning us back, and Free Guy is built around his entire star persona, the self-effacing originality of which José remarks upon. Reynolds plays Guy, a videogame non-player character - an extra, essentially, following a programmed routine within a virtual world - with a lightness and sweetness that defines the tone of the entire film. We discuss...

Matt Damon gives arguably a career best performance in Stillwater, as a tightly-wound, reserved, Oklahoma roughneck doing his best to support his daughter, who has been convicted of murder and resides in a Marseille prison. We discuss the film's origins in the real case of Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher, consider how well the characterisation works and where it might fail, and work through our f...

Disney has already turned one of its theme park rides into a box office colossus - is it time for another? They seem to think so, bringing us Jungle Cruise, an adaptation of one of the attractions from Disneyland's grand opening in 1955, the Jungle River Cruise, starring The Rock, who we still refuse to call Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Jack Whitehall, as explorers searching for the Tree of Li...

Freely based, as the closing credits tell us, on Jean Cocteau's 1930 play of the same name, The Human Voice sees Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar working in the English language for the first time. The play has long been on Almodóvar's mind, inspiring, significantly, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, among other works of his, and this short film joins the pantheon of adaptations of the play...

A chamber piece that asks what happens when your life of carefully constructed lies is exposed, Shiva Baby is a smart, tense comedy set in that most aggravating of situations: the funeral, in which you're forced to be judged by lots of people you want to avoid but aren't allowed to kick up a stink. We discuss debut writer-director Emma Seligman's handling of the story's shifts in tone, in particul...

Apparently dissatisfied with the dismal reception of 2016's Suicide Squad, DC has bravely decided to vaguely reboot the property with a spot-the-difference name change to The Suicide Squad, probably hoping that this new film will effortlessly send its predecessor down the memory hole. We ask whether it hits that whimsical tone it clearly wants to and discuss imperialism, satire, racism, gazing at...

Reminding José of 1970s auteur exploitation movies and Mike of The Twilight Zone, M. Night Shyamalan's Old confines its characters, and most of its action, to an isolated beach at a high-class tropical resort. As you might expect with Shyamalan, it's best seen with little advance knowledge, as the plot twists and turns, revelations throwing previous events into new light. But we do, indeed, encour...

1996's Space Jam is beloved of people Mike's age throughout the Western hemisphere, despite basketball's limited reach beyond North America - it was a Looney Tunes film, full of imagination and laughs, and is today a nostalgic linchpin for millennials. And because millennials now make films, it's back, twenty years on, with Space Jam: A New Legacy, featuring LeBron James in Michael Jordan's centra...

What began twenty years ago as a series of car chases and races has since spiralled out of control into an action behemoth encompassing ten films, a TV series, videogames, and theme park attractions. But for the spinoff film Hobbs & Shaw, Fast and Furious 9 is Mike's introduction to the Fast & Furious series, with José having seen some of the previous instalments, but not all. We discuss the soap...

Marvel's triumphant return to our cinemas is... a film that fills in a plot hole nobody cared about for a character who not only should have had a standalone film long before now but who has since been killed off. To say that Black Widow feels like a kick in the teeth is an understatement, but still, the MCU is back with us and we see what it has to offer. And what it presents us with is something...

An offbeat, gentle, surreal, intriguing and slightly camp comic drama, French Exit is a pleasant surprise for us both. Michelle Pfeiffer's widowed heiress, reduced to selling her late husband's property, takes what's left of her life - her cat, adult son, and attitude - to an apartment in Paris, where she resolves to spend her remaining money before ending her life. Sounds hilarious. And indeed it...

The sequel to one of the first films we discussed on Eavesdropping at the Movies, The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard reunites Samuel L. Jackson's hitman, Ryan Reynolds' bodyguard, and Salma Hayek's hitman's wife - whose role is significantly expanded from the first film's bit part. The vaguely sketched plot - Antonio Banderas wants to blow up Europe or something, and that's enough detail - is the wire...