Required Watching

Baz Luhrmann has made six feature films. Every single one is about the same thing — a person of extraordinary natural talent trapped inside a world that wants to commodify and contain that talent, expressed through maximalist visual language and music as emotional truth. EPiC, his first documentary, is the purest version of that argument he's ever made — because this time the subject is real, the...

Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 2022 Elvis biopic has Austin Butler giving a career-defining performance inside a form that couldn't co...

In October 2025, I was alone in Hiroshima. I wandered into a kabuki theater not knowing what kabuki was, and watched a performance of Princess Takiyasha. I didn't speak the language well enough to follow the dialogue. I followed every second of it anyway. Months later I watched Kokuho — Lee Sang-il's three-hour epic about kabuki's bloodline system, the outsider who transcends it, and what it costs...

Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the film most Western audiences still haven't fully understood: the political satire hiding inside the pro...

Yesterday's episode made the case that Western TV pilots lie — that they're persuasion documents built for commissioners rather than honest first chapters built for audiences. Today is the answer. J-drama structures its first episode like a complete short film — establishing emotional register before plot, tone before event, the specific texture of who these people are before anything happens to t...

The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series behind them. This episode makes the structural case for why the pilot format is lying to you, which pil...

Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018. The reviews were glowing. The words "found family" and "poverty" appeared in almost all of them. And most of them described a film that is significantly less interesting than the one Kore-eda actually made. This episode makes the case that Western criticism landed on the warmth and missed the argument — and that the argument, which is cold and spec...

The British film industry produces diversity reports. It has standards, targets, tick-box initiatives, and annual announcements about progress. And the structural situation for Black filmmakers — in development, in commissioning, in creative control — has barely moved. This episode isn't another recitation of the numbers. It's about what the numbers can't capture: the specific texture of how exclu...

Somewhere in the British TV development process, the logline became the product. Not the story. Not the characters. The pitch. The elevator concept that sounds clean in a commissioning meeting and then struggles to hold together past episode two. This episode makes the case that British TV has built a development culture that selects for ideas that are easy to explain — and what that's costing us...

Summary In this episode,we discuss the profound impact of Disney's 1992 film Aladdin on the animation industry and its cultural significance. He highlights how Aladdin redefined Disney's approach to animated musicals through innovative storytelling, memorable music, and the introduction of a relatable protagonist. The film's humor, particularly through Robin Williams' iconic performance as the Gen...

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller. ▶️  Subscribe for new video essays every week :   ▶️  Website ▶️  Twitter/X ▶️  Instagram ▶️  Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

 You're tired of actors you actually like. That's not an accident — it's a business model. Hollywood is treating talent as intellectual property and audiences as brand targets, casting for TikTok engagement rather than craft. This episode breaks down the human IP factory, why it's going to collapse, and what Song Kang-ho and Paul Mescal's careers tell us about what's actually worth watching....

A personal re-watch of The Lion King — this time with a kid and a writer's eye — surfaces something hiding in plain sight. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" is Simba telling the audience exactly what he wants and the film giving it to him in the cruelest possible way. A breakdown of protagonist desire, emotional craft, and why this film hits differently as a parent. Required Watching is your curricul...

 A 67-minute German silent film from 1920 is the foundation of modern horror, film noir, and psychological cinema. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari invented the unreliable narrator, the expressionist frame as psychological state, and the authoritarian villain. Here's why it still matters. Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to...

Hollywood abandoned the mid-budget everything-film. Chennai Express — Shah Rukh Khan, Rohit Shetty, every genre at once — proves Bollywood never did. A breakdown of why this specific kind of film is so hard to make well, and what it teaches about craft. Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storytell...

Twisters has some of the best storm sequences in recent cinema. It also abandons Daisy Edgar-Jones, pivots to a rom-com, and loses the thread entirely in the second half. Quick reaction on what went wrong, and why a film this well-made managed to underdeliver. Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper st...

 Kevin Hart made a show about Kevin Hart wanting to be an action star — except he already is one. Die Hart is fun, disposable, and accidentally fascinating. This episode is a short rant that becomes a bigger question: what happens when enormous talent picks small bets? Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you becom...

A film from the London Film Festival about a disabled couple who want to get married — and can't, because the UK benefits system punishes them for it. Patrice: The Movie is playful, warm, and devastating. And it exposes a privilege most of us have never thought to question. Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you becom...

What happens when a film about conversion therapy is so aggressively colour-coded that the production design becomes the argument? In this episode, we break down But I’m a Cheerleader — Jamie Babbitt’s 1999 queer camp classic that weaponises pink, pastel, and Natasha Lyonne against the logic of forced identity correction. We talk about camp as a protest language (not just an aesthetic), why Megan’...

In this special capstone episode, we reflect on our month-long journey through the world of Black cinema. This isn't just a recap; it's a personal synthesis of the most powerful and enduring lessons these films have taught me about the art of storytelling. From the pioneers of the 1920s to the worldbuilders of today, this is what Black cinema taught me about what it means to be a filmmaker. THE FO...

 In this critical companion to our "Reprogrammers" video, we ask a tough question: If these films were so brilliant, why did it take so long for the industry to recognize them? This is a deep dive into the systems of power, taste, and commerce that shape film history, and a celebration of the masterpieces that were decades ahead of their time. DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE: The First Draft of His...

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller. ▶️  Subscribe for new video essays every week :   ▶️  Website ▶️  Twitter/X ▶️  Instagram ▶️  Letterboxd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this personal episode of the Required Watching podcast, I'm exploring what happens when Black cinema crosses borders. As a Black American living in the UK, I didn't grow up with these stories. I came to them later, and that distance changed how I heard them. This isn't about explaining Black Britain. It's about the profound shift that happens when you stop expecting art to sound like home. CHAP...

This is a deep dive into the mechanics of how history is written, how "canons" are formed, and what we lose when we erase the origin stories of pioneering artists. DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE: - The Question: Why Don't We Learn This in School? - What is "The Canon" and Who Decides? - The Four Filters: Archives, Academia, Criticism, and Commerce - The Cost of Erasure: What We Lose - What Early Black...

In this episode of Required Watching, Tray Epps explores the theme of emotional fluency through cooking in cinema. He discusses three films—'Eat Drink Man Woman', 'Pieces of April', and 'The Farewell'—highlighting how food serves as a medium for expressing complex emotions and familial connections. The conversation delves into how these films illustrate the power of meals in conveying love, grief,...