Return to Form

In their 2nd despatch from Wroclaw, Owen, Ralph and George cover James Benning’s new structural state of the nation United States of America, Claire Denis’ dodgy lockdown drama Both Sides of the Blade, David Cronenberg’s speculative surgery sci-fi, Michel Franco’s existential Acapulco ennui in Sundown and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s poignant road movie Broker.

The boys are back in town, and the town is Wroclaw, Poland - a sweaty Mecca for cineastes across Europe. Joined by frequent guest George MacBeth, Ralph and Owen dissect Ruben Östlund’s new caustic cruise comedy, Jerzy Skolimowski’s dizzying tale of a downtrodden donkey, Lukas Dhont’s tender childhood tragedy and Ulrich Seidl’s formidable Rimini. Garnish your pierogies and settle in for our first r...

All good things must come to an end. The first of those is our four-episode season on Jean-Luc Godard, coming to a climatic halt with this hour-long chat with a jetlagged Daniel Neofetou. We did Godard the essayist, covering the dense thickets of his Mark Kermode-baiting wonders: IMAGE BOOK, GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE, and FILM SOCIALISME. And the second ‘end’ is MUUB TUBE itself. For seventy-odd episode...

Between the brooding, overcast skies of LA VIE DE JESUS (1997) and the molten media-sploitation of FRANCE (2021), French filmmaker Bruno Dumont has worn many (often contradictory) hats. But for this one-time enfant terrible of French arthouse cinema, a persistent thread can be carefully picked out. And to begin the work of that tangled unpicking, the boys enlist the support of arch Dumontian Georg...

The promise of a Raúl Ruiz film is almost irresistible, vivid colours, dynamic camera movement, non-linearity, pirates! And yet his unique films are little-seen, not quite canon. Ralph and Owen took a bold voyage through his seafaring 1983 classics City of Pirates and Three Crowns of a Sailor and ponder, were these ravishing ripples redolent of an undiscovered new wave, or is it all just naval gaz...

A cinematic late starter, English filmmaker Joanna Hogg has been known for her clinically cool skewerings of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. But then, in 2019, she dropped The Souvenir - a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical account of her own artistic development and trials as a twenty-something film student. Resplendent and eerie, she’s now followed it up with The Souvenir part II - a...

Elaine May's 'Mikey and Nicky' stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as old cronies bickering, and on the run. Cassevetes film 'Husbands' made around the same time, stars Cassavetes himself, Falk again, and Ben Gazarra as a pack of middle class dad bods wearing themselves out with aimless adventures in New York and London. That as maybe today's podcast is about Ralph and Owen: two dirtbag film podc...

A spectre is haunting central London, the spectre of five ebullient young men podcasting outside a pub on a warm night - the occasion is Olaf Nicolai’s Marx, a 24 hour film shown at the ICA this week, which consists entirely of one continuous closely-framed shot of a Karl Marx statue in Chemnitz, Germany. Owen and Ralph are joined by Daniel Neofetou, Matthew Turner and on the phone from Munich, Ge...

Nine years have elapsed since the last salvo sprung from the mind of the layabout Leos Carax (remember, he was the director of 2012’s unkempt Holy Motors). Now, Carax brings us Anette. And it's a musical - a sort of sloppy and often sublime mess of a thing that seems as indebted to Bo Burnham as it is Fellini (apes of god, uncanny mannequins, the lot). But is Anette good enough, or does it go out...

Owen takes a long, hard look at Sátántangó - the seven hour magnum opus of Hungarian montage-hater Béla Tarr.

Ralph shares some immediate, close-mic reflections on Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel, or the Time of a Return - a whirlwind of desire and deception, full of deft cuts and lost love.

German cinema would be much impoverished without the unique filmmaker and cultural wrangler Alexander Kluge. The boys are joined by George MacBeth to revel in Kluge's most ambitious works, those that oscillate wildly between multiple fictional and documentary forms; including Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, The Power of Emotion, Germany in Autumn and Yesterday Girl 

Ralph defends Terence Malick's star-studded late career odyssey of luxury and ennui with a spirited late-night monologue.

Owen keeps the show on the road, reflecting on two recent cinema outings, Godzilla and First Cow.

This week, the boys take their first podcast plunge into Bergman’s extensive oeuvre. The subject? Autumn Sonata of 1978. An explosively charged chamber piece that does open heart surgery on a tricky mother-daughter relationship. There’s baggage, there's close-ups, and there’s a lot barely concealed angst. Is this Bergman at his “most” Bergman? Probably. But is it his best?

It's actually pretty good. Ralph is on strike. 

Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze is the subject of this week’s episode. His folk pastoral The Wishing Tree, with its blend of slapstick and sacrifice, enchants the boys in unequal measure, but they also dig up his Soviet satire Repentance for (partial) inspection. By the halfway mark, zapped of zeal after a year of lockdown film-watching, the boys digress into grassier pastures.

Who's the daddy? Between the young, flighty romance of À Nos Amours and the earnest soul-searching of Under the Sun of Satan Maurice Pialat carved out a brusque editing style - balanced by tender naturalistic performances. Writer Paige Murphy joins the boys to unpack Pialat's contradictions, spiritually, sexually and cinematically.

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror”. These lines are uttered, by Jean-Luc Godard himself, in 1983’s Prenom Carmen. Wild of hair, cigar to his lips. A Delphic oracle treading a tightrope between madness and cinema. In the years between 1983 and 1993, Godard turned his camera away from the screeching confections of his revolutionary period, and began to ask bigger and more transcendent que...

Insider? Outsider? Shakeitallaboutsider? Robert Altman’s career was prolific and paradoxical, but what makes his films so memorable? Perhaps it’s the cat food in The Long Goodbye, or the all-yellow motel in 3 Women, maybe it’s Elliot Gould stuffing his shoes with banknotes at the end of California Split, or the off-kilter interrogation scene in The Player? Joining Owen and Ralph this week is actre...

Who’s afraid of structural film? Not special guests Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Daniel Neofetou, who join the boys this week to discuss the adventurous career of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. What is a film when the film is concentrated, elongated, and entirely the sum of its parts? They look at Wavelength (1967), La Region Centrale (1971), "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis...

Out of the ashes of Mai '68 rises a very irritating phoenix, the didactic docu-diatribes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and their comrades at the Dziga Vertov Group, who take the collective blame for British Sounds (1969), Wind from the East (1970) and Tout Va Bien (1972). Ralph and Owen pore over the methodology behind the madness, wondering whether a cinema of displeasure can ever liberat...

Since his debut in 1980, Pedro Almodovar has become Spain's most cherished auteur. Trashy and transgressive in his trademark Technicolor, Almodovar's cinema of darkly comedic and twisted telenovelas has sensually probed the darker corners of Spanish modernity. Passion, sexuality, drugs, and insanity. His is a world of melodramatic matadors, diffident directors, pouting pimps, and star-crossed love...

Part 1 of 3: Owen and Ralph delve deep into Jean-Luc Godard’s energetic first decade, a treasure trove or cinephilia, aesthetic innovation and frustrated romance. From the frisson of Breathless to the acid satire of Weekend the boys explore how the Cahier critic became France’s most accomplished auteur. And this is only the start…   Full list of films covered: A bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie, Le M...

Birth, sex, marriage, death. The movement of the stars and the planets, the chopping down of a tree. For Stan Brakhage, the prolific high priest of American experimental cinema, the entirety of existence was under the lens - something both beautiful and mortally terrifying. This week, the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou to dissect some of Brakhage's most essential works: Antic...