Pop Screen

This week, Pop Screen is warming up its fingers to peruse the lexicon of love with Mantrap, a short film starring ABC - but mostly their lead singer Martin Fry - and directed by Pop Screen's patron saint Julien Temple. Once again, we're joined by Gav Smith from the very fine My Favourite Film podcast, as he takes on his most challenging assignment to date - persuading Graham that early '80s synth...

It's in the trees! It's coming! Yes, this week Pop Screen is gleefully hopping on board the Kate Bush bandwagon - what else were we going to do, wait for a new album or tour? - with a look at the Blessed Kate's two main acting credits. The Line, The Cross and the Curve is her now-disowned directorial debut, released to tie in with her album The Red Shoes and loosely inspired by the Hans Christian...

Pop Screen's Bowie month ends in the only way it was ever going to: with a lot of talk about Muppets and 'packages'. Made during a critical and commercial low point in Bowie's musical career, this elaborate Jim Henson-directed fantasy nevertheless gave him one of his most celebrated screen roles - and, in its maddeningly catchy musical numbers, gave us easily the most enjoyable songs of his mid-80...

The centrepiece of Pop Screen's Bowie month could only be one thing: David's first, extraordinary lead role, as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg's trippy science fiction masterpiece. For those unfamiliar with the film, Bowie plays an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to bring water back to his home planet, funding his return trip by patenting alien technology. But the world of high fina...

Yeah, when we announced a month of David Bowie movies, you weren't expecting this one, were you? An adaptation of an obscure early Berthold Brecht play that Bowie recorded for the BBC in between Scary Monsters and Let's Dance, Baal is quite probably the most challenging artefact in his screen career - and we're including the Twin Peaks movie in that tally. But it's also thematically linked to his...

Pop Screen kicks off a special month dedicated to the films of David Bowie with perhaps his last great role, as the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's equally enigmatic thriller. A story of magic, revenge and dead wives (look, we said it was a Christopher Nolan film), it sees Bowie join a remarkable cast including Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson,...

We normally use a still from the film for our episode image, but who could resist this photo from the premiere of Neill Blomkamp's Chappie? It perfectly encapsulates the bizarre appeal of the film, which assembles an enviable cast of blue-chip movie stars and reliable character actors, then has them play support to a Johnny 5/Robocop hybrid and a South African rap group, not necessarily in that or...

It's no surprise that Pop Screen keeps going back to the 1960s - in many ways, that decade saw the birth of the pop movie as a recognisable genre. That doesn't mean that every film became a classic, although the film we're looking at today became a cult classic of the most disreputable type. Famously described by Mark Kermode as "the Plan 9 from Outer Space of musicals", Robert Hartford-Davis's Go...

When Graham and Sarah decided to do an episode on Never Rarely Sometimes Always, it was not a topical film. Its storyline, about a young girl crossing state lines in order to get an abortion, now puts it at the forefront of a major American news story, but there's much more to Eliza Hittman's film than being merely newsworthy. It's a haunting, measured, beautifully acted and shot film that never l...

Can you believe this is our first Jim Jarmusch episode? The white-haired director's habit of casting musicians means pretty much all of his films qualify for this show, with regular collaborators including Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA. All of them turn up in this, his ensemble zombie comedy from 2019, along with the rather less expected name of Selena Gomez. (Gomez's presence does at least mean thi...

We're returning to the pop landscape of the early 2000s this week, a pop landscape that had your host Graham wondering whether there was any point being a pop cartographer any more. The dominant feature of said landscape was TV talent shows, usually run by either Simon Cowell or his Salieri, Simon Fuller, the latter of whom masterminded this week's film. A modern-day beach party movie starring fir...

Pop Screen is going into hardcore auteur territory this week, with a film directed by and starring the one and only Barbara Streisand. A story of hidden family secrets, illicit affairs, licit affairs, quasi-licit affairs - look, there's a lot of affairs, alright? - it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars while Streisand was snubbed for Best Director, suggesting her music career was prevent...

Pop Screen is going a bit off the beaten track this week, but rewardingly so. Peter Watkins is a maverick British director whose previous film The War Game was banned on the instruction of then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, so when he was hired by Universal to make a teen-focused rock and roll film they probably expected something insurrectionary. What they might not have expected is for Watkins t...

Can you believe this is Pop Screen's first animated film? Better late than never, as Gav Smith of My Favourite Film rejoins us to talk about Interstella 5555 - The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A story as epic as its frankly overlong title, it was created by Daft Punk as both a homage to the anime they loved growing up and a visual accompaniment to their classic 2001 album Discovery. On this we...

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-Moonstruck, a film which is not exactly subtle in its depiction of Italian-American culture but is at least witty, well-written and full of heart, thanks to its script by John Patrick Shanley. This week, Pop Screen closes out its Oscars month by inviting playwright Sarah Hayton back on to discuss Norman Jewison's 1987 film, which won Cher...

Pop Screen's Oscar month continues with one of the 21st century's biggest collectors of little bald gold men - Rob Marshall's Chicago. Among its twelve nominations and six wins was a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1990s hip-hop stalwart Queen Latifah, who gets a solo number crammed with innuendo, but she was beaten to the win by her own cast-mate Catherine Zeta-Jones. This week, Cliff from...

Pop Screen's Oscar month goes back to, er, 2021 with the film widely predicted to win Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Less a biopic of the titular blues singer and more a drama about temptation and (often racial) exploitation adapted  from August Wilson's play, it nevertheless features a powerhouse, Oscar-nominated turn from Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. This week, Ewan...

March is Oscar month on Pop Screen, and as luck would have it one of this year's frontrunners is absolutely made for us. A goofy, shaggy 1970s coming-of-age comedy featuring a Tom Waits cameo, the entire band HAIM and their parents - seriously, their real-life parents - it's inspired rabid devotion and some dissent for its treatment of racial prejudice, age-gap relationships and its outspoken pro-...

What kind of film do you think the above image is from, listeners? If you answered "Why, a biopic of a 1960s rock band, of course", congratulations - you are Oliver Stone, and this is an episode of Pop Screen about your 1991 film The Doors. Join Doors fan Aidan and Doors, uh, not-fan Graham for an exploration of this fabulously lavish, maddeningly shallow account of Jim Morrison's life and death,...

Back in 2007, Wong Kar-Wai could have done anything for his first American film. What he chose to do was cast easy-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones in a road movie where she would play alongside David Straithairn, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Natalie Portman, and tell her not to take acting lessons because she's such a natural. Which, you must agree, is a choice! On this week's Pop Screen, Sarah and Graha...

The 1960s were, depending on your viewpoint, either the best or the worst time to release a film about political assassinations, and there weren't many wilder examples than John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. A wildly paranoid tale of a returning military veteran convinced that one of his brothers-in-arms is now a brainwashed Communist assassin, it essentially created the conspiracy thr...

Looky looky at our black booky: this week Pop Screen is looking at an artefact of the utmost early '90sness, Vanilla Ice's first and only starring vehicle Cool As Ice. Deeply influenced by the teen rebel films of the 1950s and shot by Spielberg's future DoP Janusz Kaminski, these classy influences sit uncomfortably with a story in which Kristin Minter falls in love with the Iceman after he nearly...

Pop Screen is 50 episodes old! To celebrate, we've got Gav Smith from the My Favourite Film podcast back in to cover one of the big names (in terms of profile, if not in height) that we haven't covered so far - Prince, and his blockbuster first movie Purple Rain. Gav is a Prince superfan, Graham a Prince ignoramus - can he be converted? More a vehicle for the extraordinary album accompanying it th...

Pop Screen makes another foray into the documentary realm this week, with Aidan rejoining regular host Graham to look at Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. An ambitious film rooted as much in its subject's imagination as it is the facts of his life, it was highly acclaimed as a portrait of the late Kurt Cobain, even as its strict factual accuracy was debated. As well as Morgen...

A pop movie is normally a chance to consolidate, rather than destroy, an image, which is why the Monkees' sole trip in front of the camera is such a strange affair. Produced by BBS Productions at the same time as they were making Easy Rider - and with the Dennis Hopper cameo to prove it - 1968's Head is a freeform collection of surrealist sketches, musical numbers and anti-war agitprop, shot throu...