Eavesdropping at the Movies

Ethics and truth in the land of documentary come under the microscope in our discussion of Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne's love letter to his childhood friend, Andrew Bagby, is a sensational and moving film that you should know as little as possible about before watching. It's exceptionally effective, built out of a combination of interviews, home footage,...

First-time writer-director Noah Hutton imagines, in Lapsis, a near-future gig economy dystopia that isn't that different from our own. Unable to pay for his brother's healthcare, Dean Imperial's Ray takes on contracting work for a Google-esque tech giant, hiking through forests laying cables. Imperial's performance is a standout, his Ray always sympathetic and legible, and Hutton's sketchy, piecem...

An expensive flop in its day, The Day of the Locust maintains a cult intrigue for its critique of Hollywood and descent into madness. It's new for both of us, and we discuss the qualities its cast brings, what could be better about its industry commentary, its moments of surprisingly graphic violence, and who, or what, its titular locusts are. Recorded on 28th February 2021.

We explore a wonderful Taiwanese film that Netflix forgot it had, A Sun. An intimate yet epic drama about the effects of a single mistake that reverberate through a family and down the years, it's gorgeously lit and shot, and although it feels as long as it is, every moment is earned and valuable. It asks fundamental questions of its characters and of us, the most important of which is: What does...

Our two-part discussion of Rocky concludes with a look at the entire series of eight films, including the two Creed movies. It's a series that's deeply interested in its own history, regularly referring to it in montages of characters' memories, journeys back to iconic locations, and the reintroduction of one particular character in Creed II. The series rewards its audience for its investment, alt...

In this first of our two-part discussion of the Rocky films, we look at the film that began the series almost 50 years ago. There's a lot about 1976's Rocky that... isn't that good. John G. Avildsen's direction is drab, the story basic, the themes rudimentary - but with that comes a roughness and a sincerity to the whole affair that might be just what makes it work after all. Sylvester Stallone's...

Why this film was made... is rather beyond us. News of the World invokes the era of fake news in name only, its premise - following the Civil War, a former Confederate captain travels the American south reading out newspapers for a living - interesting in principle but almost entirely ignored in favour of a by-the-numbers, surrogate father-daughter road movie. Paul Greengrass' direction, eschewing...

Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whose partnership in the 50s and 60s helped define American comedy, collaborate on a film for the first time in 1996, as director and screenwriter respectively, giving us a comedy so sharp and outrageous that José's laughter made Mike miss half the dialogue. An adaptation of the French farce, La Cage aux Folles, The Birdcage sees Robin Williams' South Beach drag club o...

A pro-union, pulpy noir in 1957, not long after the House Un-American Activities Committee was at its height, is nothing to be sniffed at, even if its stance is to align union interests with business, and blame most of the bad things that happen on organised crime. The Garment Jungle dramatises the infiltration of the mob into New York's Garment District with arguably surprising elegance, particul...

John Smith's 16-minute short, Citadel, gives voice to the City of London - Prime Minister Boris Johnson's voice, specifically. Filmed during the first few months of lockdown in 2020, it builds an oppositional portrait of British life under Johnson's blustery leadership - it's Boris Johnson vs. the British people, and the City vs. the British people. But in tying Johnson to the City, it ignores his...

A young, destitute couple seek survival and stability in Yuzo Kawashima's 1956 drama, Suzaki Paradise: Akashingō (in English, this subtitle is given as Red Light, or Red Light District). Tsutae and Yoshiji spend their last few yen on a bus to anywhere, ending up on the outskirts of Tokyo's red light district, separated from it only by an ominous bridge that is spoken of by the locals as though fe...

A key film in Paul Newman's career that gave us one of cinema's most iconic lines, Cool Hand Luke is known to both Mike and José - but previously seen by neither. The reasons that it became a cultural touchstone remain crystal clear, despite it failing, to a significant degree, to grab us as it might. We question the authenticity and purpose of Luke's rebellion, the depiction of prison life, and t...

Occupying some similar thematic terrain to Coco, Pixar's 2017 masterpiece, Soul uses an afterlife-bound journey with a tight deadline to explore what it is that makes us human, in the context of a life devoted to music. When Joe, a music teacher and passionate jazz pianist, dies in a classic open manhole cover accident, his soul, now separated from his body but desperate to live, escapes an A Matt...

Despite a couple of charmingly enthusiastic performances from Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig, Wonder Woman 1984 disappoints, betraying what the title character stands for. We discuss the gender dynamics and representations, the Eighties setting, the Trumpian themes of greed, lust for power and the use of mass media to con, the opening scene that offers a glimpse of what the film could have been, an...

Small Axe ends with what, based on his 2014 profile in the Guardian, we take to be a tale partially inspired by Steve McQueen's own childhood. In Education, a young dyslexic boy, Kingsley, is transferred to a school for the "educationally subnormal", a real practice in the 1970s that disproportionately involved black children. The institution to which he's sent is barely a school, the children lef...

The theme of assimilation is given a fascinating twist in Alex Wheatle, the fourth Small Axe film. While Mangrove and Red, White and Blue, in particular, depicted black people's attempts to assimilate into mainland British culture and life and the racism they faced, the title character here is a young black man brought up in an abusive children's home, orphaned from his parents, and whose move to...

Another Steve McQueen rendition of a true story, Red, White and Blue examines institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police, as did Mangrove - but from the inside. Leroy Logan, a research scientist, applies to the police with the express intention of combating its attitude and behaviour towards black people, in part because of his father's own abuse at their hands. The theme of black British ide...

José hasn’t seen a worse film from David Fincher than Mank, a contentious biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter whose collaboration with Orson Welles resulted in The Greatest Film of All Time™, Citizen Kane. Mike had rather a good time, despite seeing numerous problems with the film, raising the question: How much background knowledge is the right amount for enjoying Mank? Mank doesn’t...

Do English people get Preston Sturges? Is his work all it's cracked up to be? These questions are on the table as we tackle The Palm Beach Story, a film Mike's twice been encouraged to see by Canadians, and twice found infuriating and tiresome. José's a fan, and we discuss the differences in our responses to the film, the pleasures that can be found within it, and how Sturges gives comically sensi...

Small Axe continues with Lovers Rock, a stunning musical set in a house party in the 1980s. Hit follows hit on the soundtrack, and José in particular is blown away by how Steve McQueen's camera observes its euphoric subjects, concentrating on specific body parts, taking as much time as it likes to explore the mood, the resulting experience as sensuous as any we can recall. We discuss the cross-nat...

Small Axe, Steve McQueen's remarkable anthology of five films made for the BBC, begins with Mangrove, a dramatisation of the 1971 trial of the Mangrove Nine, a key event in British history in which the institutional racism of the Metropolitan Police was successfully litigated by members of the black community in Notting Hill. While it is undoubtedly key, it's an event with which neither Mike nor J...

You find us in reflective mood, as we reflect upon a reflective Swedish comedy, Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Hopping between vignettes, Andersson's dispassionate camera sits in corners of rooms, its wide angle lens taking in everything on display from wall to wall, as often absurd and sometimes unsettling action slowly unfolds. The final film in Andersson's "Li...

1924's The City Without Jews, an Austrian silent film adapted from Hugo Bettauer's enormously successful novel of the same name, published two years earlier, imagines a European city undergoing hyperinflation and mass unemployment, blaming the Jews for its problems, and expelling them. Unthinkable! Needless to say, it both drew on and prefigured actual events, but some of the imagery is chillingly...

The winner of the 1971 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis tells an aching story of doomed love within a wealthy Jewish community in Fascist Italy. The 1938 racial laws, enforcing the segregation of Italian Jews, have just been introduced, but the titular family's titular garden offers insulation from the rising tide of fascism - for a while. M...

We're enraptured by a musical neither of has seen before, 1932's Love Me Tonight, starring Maurice Chevalier as a charming and roguish Parisian tailor, and Jeanette MacDonald as a princess he falls for. Its soundtrack is peppered with Rodgers and Hart classics, and its stunning audiovisual design is endlessly experimental, expressive and exciting. In amongst our swooning over the film's many pleas...