Pop Screen

Has Pop Screen gone highbrow? A biopic of a classical composer isn't normally the kind of film we'd cover, but then biopics of classical composers aren't usually anything like Lisztomania. The final instalment in Ken Russell's legendary series of films about his classical music heroes, it stars Roger Daltrey from The Who as Franz Liszt, Ringo Starr as the Pope, and this is not even...

Madness! Madness, they call them Madness, which is fair enough, because that's their name. At a very early stage in their quest to become one of Britain's most beloved bands, the Nutty Boys starred in a semi-improvised film about their formation and rise to fame. It was called Take It Or Leave It, it was surprisingly serious in tone, and it was, as Suggs put it, "the beginning and the...

It's playtime! Pop Screen is starting a themed month on "autobiopics" - films where pop stars play themselves, but in a different context to the standard rock doc. The nearest we'll get to documentary is this film by Morgan Neville, which sees Pharrell Williams talk about his incredible career and range of star collaborators - Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z and more - throug...

"So we're doing this, right?" The new film from David Lowery, the director of The Green Knight, is not a love story, it's not a ghost story, and a lot of people aren't sure what it is at all. We know it's definitely about a very Gaga-esque pop star played by Anne Hathaway trying to heal the wounds of the past with her estranged dress designer (Michaela Coel), and we know...

It's one of the great films of the '90s, from one of the most Pop Screen-friendly directors of all time: Jim Jarmusch, a man who can't even make a little family drama without sticking Tom Waits in there. Here, he's making a Western starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, a lot of people who would go on to be very famous, and the former lead singer of the Stooges. In a dress and bonne...

Back to the '90s, and a time when a movie could just be, y'know, anything you wanted. The co-writer of Sid & Nancy, Abbe Wool, went to test this theory with this wilfully inconsequential road movie in which a member of X (John Doe) and a member of The Beastie Boys (Adam "Ad-Rock" Horowitz) set off to scatter the ashes of a friend of the former musician. It's really the ex...

The Jimi Hendrix estate have been notably controlling of the film rights to his life story since his death at the totemic age of 27. Hollywood, though, cannot stand for a classic rock star to go un-biopicised (it's a word now), which is why in 2013 John Ridley got Andre Benjamin - yes, Andre 3000 from OutKast - to play the legendary guitarist in Jimi: All is By My Side, a film tackling Hendrix...

The history of pop is as much about subcultures as it is music, and this week Pop Screen is diving into one of the most enduring (at least round co-host Mick's gaff): mod. From its origins, which were so controversial the phrase "moral panic" was coined to describe the press reaction (fact!) to the late '70s revival that gave the world The Jam, there's always been some corner...

SAMMEH! Yes, finally we're getting round to Ryan Coogler's box-office-busting, Oscars-history-making period vampire gangster epic. Joe from Dreaming Machine rejoins Graham to talk about how Coogler's hit film explores the history, tradition and continued relevance of the blues, all the time mindful of our... let's say shaky status as two white guys talking about this. We want your...

Have you seen The Bride yet? No, not Maggie Gyllenhaal's new film - we mean the 1985 film by Frank Roddam, director of Quadrophenia. Like Gyllenhaal's film, it's an attempt at a female-centred sequel to Mary Shelley's novel. Unlike Gyllenhaal's film, it has an actively deranged cast list including Quentin Crisp, Alexei Sayle, Ken Campbell, David Rapaport... and, as Dr. Frankens...

It's the documentary you never knew you needed, and you do need it. Marcie Hume's chronicle of life on the road with '80s child actor Corey Feldman and his backing band of skimpily-dressed 'Angels' tracks the fallout from his infamous 2016 Today Show performance, which went viral and had the world asking questions like "Is this a sex cult?" and "No, seriously, is...

This week, Pop Screen takes you to church. On its release, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace became the biggest-selling gospel album of all time, but it was only supposed to be half the story. Originally, it was going to accompany a concert film with the Queen of Soul going back to her roots at an LA baptist church - but that fell through for the dumbest imaginable reason. To find out what that...

Can it really be ten years since David Bowie died? This week, Pop Screen dives back into the prolific screen career of the Thin White Duke with one of his sexiest, most stylish and silliest films - Tony Scott's 1983 debut The Hunger. A story of vampirism, lesbianism and extremely '80s stylistic mannerisms, it co-stars Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. Join Graham and Mick as they discu...

Another year's over, so it's time to convene an Avengers movie's worth of Geek Show contributors to answer the only question that matters: what was good this year? Did Sinners live up to the hype? What was our pick of the Oscar race? Did 28 Years Later live up to Simon's extremely exacting standards of realism for Geordie accents? In this packed show, Graham and Rob are joined by K...

Roll up, roll up, and let Mark and Graham take you back to 1967, a time when the Beatles had already conquered cinema with Richard Lester. As a result, they decided to make their own film, with no script and the entire band as co-directors, then broadcast it on BBC One on Boxing Day. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, as it turned out, although Magical Mystery Tour still has a substantial cult f...

It's the dead of winter, so what better time to watch the frostiest of music movies - in every sense? Set in a bitterly cold early '60s New York, the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis sees Oscar Isaac's titular folk singer getting the cold shoulder wherever he goes, whether it's from his volcanically angry ex, played by Carey Mulligan, or the strange hand of fate itself. This...

Get yourself a couple of small beers, pop The Battle of Algiers on and enjoy a (French) 75 minutes with Graham and Simon talking about arguably THEE film of 2025 - Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. The story of a gone-to-seed revolutionary fighting to protect his daughter from a simultaneously ridiculous and plausible nemesis, it's a big-budget epic with the soul of a weird...

Greetings from Castbury Pod! For our latest episode, Graham is joined by new co-host Ian to discuss a Bruce Springsteen movie - but not the one you're thinking of. Yes, while Deliver Me From Nowhere is still in theatres, we're rewinding a few years to look at Gurinder Chadha's Blinded by the Light, a true story of an ordinary British Pakistani boy in 1980s Luton finding his voice throu...

When Max Planck began his ground-breaking work on quantum theory, do you think he realised it would be used to prove Satan is a flask of slime in the basement of a San Francisco church? This is - we think - the plot of Prince of Darkness , in every way John Carpenter's weirdest film. Its bizarre plot involves precognitive dreams, clerical conspiracies and possessed homeless people, the latter...

Well, it's not Halloween without a bit of trick or treating, isn't it? Pop Screen's spooky month kicks off with an '80s teen horror that also allows us to remember one of the greats we lost this year - Ozzy Osbourne, whose short but hilarious cameo as an anti-rock preacher in Charles Martin Smith's movie allows the Black Sabbath frontman a chance to kick back at a moral panic h...

The loneliness of eternity. The horrors of the 20th century. Nick Cave's hair. Yes, this week Pop Screen is tackling the biggest things possible with Wings of Desire, in which Wim Wenders's observations of Berlin, fondness for the poetry of Rilke and Bad Seeds fandom combined to form one of the most unlikely masterpieces of the 1980s. Join Joe and Graham as they discuss Wenders's waywa...

As impossible as it seems, there are people who can still do original things with superheroes - and it's no surprise that one of those people is Boots Riley. One part of the deliciously funky activist hip-hop act The Coup, he turned to directing with 2018's outrageous comedy Sorry to Bother You and followed it up with this singular Amazon Prime series about a reclusive giant teenager who yearns of...

Pavement are a scrappy, bewildering band, so it's only fair that they get a scrappy, bewildering biopic - or is it? A hybrid of documentary, spoof, situationist prank and an off-Broadway jukebox musical that somehow actually happened in reality, Alex Ross Perry's Pavements throws the ultimate slacker band into a hall of mirrors in order to ask the question: what does it mean to never sell...

We've covered the odd world of The Comic Strip Presents... on Pop Screen before, when Mark and Graham looked at their Kate Bush-starring TV epic Les Dogs. But they also made big-screen films, the first of which featured even more pop stars - Lemmy, Paul McCartney, Shane MacGowan, Bill Wyman, Sandie Shaw, Jools Holland and more - and made even less sense. This week, Mark and Graham reconvene to...

In the middle of a not-great summer for musical icons, one death hit us particularly hard. It's Sly Stone, the mercurial, genre-hopping singer, producer and songwriter at the heart of Sly and the Family Stone, a funk Prometheus who suffered too much for bringing humanity its finest grooves. And, as it turns out, subject of a new documentary by Aamir "Questlove" Thompson, called Sly L...