Kermode & Mayo’s Take

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you’ll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you’re already a Vanguardista, we salute y...

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you’ll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you’re already a Vanguardista, we salute y...

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you’ll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you’re already a Vanguardista, we salute y...

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you’ll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you’re already a Vanguardista, we salute y...

It’s ‘Mickey 17’ release day, and Ben is chatting to Director Bong Joon Ho in today’s episode to celebrate. Starring Robert Pattinson as an expendable worker on a colonized ice planet, the new film from Korean cinema’s modern master sees protagonist Mickey ‘re-printed’ over and over again.  Frequently killed in his dangerous daily tasks, ‘human printing technology’ allows Mickey to be simply rebor...

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you’ll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you’re already a Vanguardista, we salute y...

Begbie himself, and surely a frontrunner for British cinema’s scariest man (on screen only, we might add), is our guest this week—it’s Robert Carlyle. This time he’s playing staunchly moral councilor Sam Hagen in new Netflix drama ‘Toxic Town’. Penned by Jack Thorne (of course), and with a cracking cast of Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood, Rory Kinnear and more alongside Carlyle, it tells the true...

We’ve got a bona fide icon for you in today’s Now & Ben—a movie star of four decades known for tackling tough female characters in films like ‘Boyz n the Hood’, ‘Malcolm X’, ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ and ‘Black Panther’. She is the one and only Angela Bassett. This time, she plays US president Evelyn Mitchell in ‘Zero Day’, the new Netflix thriller series in which America is struck by a cyb...

Welcome to another show jam-packed with top takes from Simon & Mark—which are still eliciting your ‘quiet affirmative noises’... Reviews this week of The Monkey—a splattery and slanted dark comedy horror about a murderous wind-up toy from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, and I’m Still Here—the Brazilian drama about ‘the disappeared’ under the military dictatorship in the 1970s that has taken the...

We hope this week’s podcast will earn your ‘quiet affirmative noises’--whatever they might sound like...??? Listeners to last week’s show may remember one correspondent’s story of a film eliciting this mysterious and elusive sound—and you’ve kindly sent in some examples to clear up this crucial matter for us. Mmhmm. Grown-up Aussie animation ‘Memoir of a Snail’ is first on Mark’s review slate this...

Awards season spinning your head? The Good Doctors have got you covered... Welcome to our awards special, where we’ll be giving you the lowdown on all the big players in this years awards nominations, all in one super-Take from Simon & Mark. We’ve brought together reviews of the titles everyone’s talking about—like Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Nosferatu and more—and interviews with the filmmaking...

Dogman heads up Mark’s review slate this week--an anarchic animation based on Captain Underpants creator Dav Pilkey’s graphic novel series, where a lifesaving operation sees a police dog and his cop handler become one crime-busting half-canine hero. Plus, The Seed of the Sacred Fig—a courageous political drama about Iran’s authoritarian government from exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof. An...

In today’s Now & Ben drop, Ben sits down with Chris Sanders—director of the Oscar-nominated animation ‘The Wild Robot’. With a stellar career behind the drawing board that’s taken him from Disney to DreamWorks, he’s the man behind ‘How To Train Your Dragon’, ‘The Croods’ and ‘Lilo and Stich’—so Ben had plenty to quiz him on. ‘The Wild Robot’ takes us on an unexpected adventure through nature with...

Brady Corbet, the now-Oscar-nominated director of ‘The Brutalist’, sits down with Simon for an interview this week. His much lauded and lengthy fictional biopic follows the life of László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who arrives in late-1940s America having survived the Holocaust, and finds his life changed once again when he picks up a commission from a wealthy industrialist. Brady chats to Simon...

Coming hot off the podcast press, we’ve got Mark’s review of ‘Flight Risk’ - under embargo until now. The Mel Gibson directed thriller sees a US Marshal escort a government witness via plane across the Alaskan wilderness to testify against a mob boss in Manhattan. Mark Wahlberg’s pilot is in charge of their safe passage, but things get turbulent when it turns out not everyone is who they seem to b...

‘The Brutalist’ is the epic structure on the horizon of this week’s movie releases; Mark reviews this fictional biopic of Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Holocaust survivor who arrives in America as an immigrant in 1947. Bauhaus trained and revered in his home country, László finds himself anonymous in a sometimes hostile USA—but gets a commission from a wealthy industrialist (Gu...

The big movie release this week is ‘A Complete Unknown’, but our guest is actually pretty famous... James Mangold, director of the much-anticipated Bob Dylan biopic and Hollywood hits from ‘Walk The Line’ to ‘Le Mans 66’, joins Simon for a chat. They talk about putting Dylan’s iconic and mysterious life onscreen, Timothée Chalamet’s awards-tipped performance as the young songwriting legend—and acc...

In this latest bonus nugget of ‘Now and Ben’ goodness, our sometime super sub Ben Bailey Smith chats to legendary film & TV writer Stephen Knight. He’s penned some of the most exciting scripts to hit our screens over the last three decades, from ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ and ‘Locke’ to ‘SAS Rogue Heroes’ and, of course, ‘Peaky Blinders’. Most recently he’s written ‘Maria’—a biopic of opera singer Mari...

Our guests this week were ‘A Real Pain’...just joking, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin were actually really nice... They sit down with Simon to discuss the comedy-drama, directed, written, produced by and starring Eisenberg alongside Culkin. They play two mismatched cousins David and Benji on a tour of Poland, the ancestral home of their late-grandmother, where they hope to reconnect with their...

Happy New Year from Mark, Simon, The Redactor and the rest of us on the Take Team! We’re kicking off 2025 with a top-drawer guest—’Nosferatu’ director Robert Eggers. He tells Simon about his new remake of the1922 silent classic, originally by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau, in which Bill Skarsgård’s vampire nobleman terrorises a town in pursuit of Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, the object of h...

It’s Boxing Day, but we’ve got more than just leftovers in today’s show—we're just as stuffed full of gourmet goodies as we hope you are right now... A fresh new guest interview this week with RaMell Ross, director of the awards-tipped ‘Nickel Boys’. Based on the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, it follows the growing friendship between two boys in racially segregated 1960s Florid...

Wassail Wassail Wassail! Christmas is almost upon us, and we’ve got a gift of a guest for you this week: Barry Jenkins, AKA Mr. Moonlight. He chats to Simon about ‘Mufasa’, the origin story for Simba’s father and the long-awaited prequel to 2016’s live action animation Lion King. When a flood washes the cub-Mufasa away from his homeland and parents, he finds himself an outsider in an altogether ne...

Presenting a new feature on the Take Channel.  ANORA has been one of the most talked-about films of 2024 so we sent supersub BEN BAILEY SMITH to speak to director Sean Baker.  In this interview you can hear Ben talk to Sean about how he judges his own work, his love of Chihuahuas, that home invasion scene, little Orphan Annie, and of course Ben asked him about the Take That needledrop. Learn more...

Our Christmas Spectacular, recorded live at London’s Prince Edward Theatre is now available in your ears! On our festive guestlist this week we have Wallce & Gromit creator Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, who co-direct the famous plasticine pair’s latest adventure Vengeance Most Fowl. They talk us through what happened when Aardman went noir for this festive film treat, share stop motion secrets...

The ‘Rumours’ are true... screen superstar Cate Blanchett and director Guy Maddin are joining Simon this week to give us the gossip on their surreal new satire—once they’ve finished fangirling over the music of Sparks, that is. Following decades of avant garde work that’s made him one of Canada’s most celebrated filmmakers, ‘Rumours’ is the biggest movie to date from the Winnipeg weirdo—its star-s...