School of Movies

[School of Movies 2022] For this one we went all-out. It was an incredibly rich and dense discussion for the initial recording and I have added a ton of extra content, all to the sounds of the eclectic soundtrack and the rarely-heard extended score of Don Davis.  This is the first part of an evolution of the binary Us vs. Them dichotomy of The Matrix (1999) and was far less successful in ensnaring...

[School of Movies 2019] NOTE: This is a re-release of the 2019 episode. It is one of our best shows and constitutes vital groundwork before we cover the three sequels over the next few weeks.  This one has been a phenomenally long time coming. Not only is it a dense and complex movie that's impossible to fully summarise even in our lengthier shows, not only does it mean a huge amount to millions o...

[School of Movies 2022] Highly appropriately we cap off the James Cameron season with both the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. We are starting 2022 with the original Avatar from 2009, and hopefully we will be finishing the year with Avatar 2. But with four more sequels planned out over the next decade it's very possible this man will spend the rest of his life on Pandora.  And t...

[School of Movies 2021] A lively and enthusiastic end of one trilogy and setup for a different flavour of future web-slinging, this thing drew gasps, cheers and applause, even from my British audience, and we don't cheer for anything except football. This is a really special and important Spider-Man movie. Beyond all hyperbole and landmark moments in comic-book style crossovers it is a story about...

[School of Movies 2021] This is the big one, folks. This is the movie I didn't realise how passionate I was about until we started engaging our analytical style to it. I've had Titanic in the back of my head as a film I really wanted to talk about for many many years, and I suspect i was waiting for The Abyss and True Lies to hit blu ray so we could do a James Cameron Season, or at least for Avata...

[School of Movies 2021] Taking a break from Cameron Season to focus on a holiday movie hardly anybody has seen or knows about. This one from 1994, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer is one of the anti-Christmas set. One for people who see the entire family coming over as a bit of a nightmare, rather than the most wonderful time of the year. The focus is on Lloyd and Caroline Chasseur, a married couple...

[School of Movies 2021] The Cameron season continues with yet another massive blockbuster for its time that is almost impossible to find in HD today. You can see why we held off this long, just waiting for Jim and the studios to get their act together and release these from the vaults.  (Un)luckily(?)  Disney have handed the IP over to a new director to make a Disney+ show. It almost certainly won...

[Digital Drift 2015] This was originally released in 2015 in a series covering the (then) five Terminator movies. But it seemed wildly appropriate to recover and spotlight the first two as the Cameron-directed pair stand tall as recognised classics while the rest imitate (though we maintain that Dark Fate from 2019 is a worthy completion of a Trilogy. Check out our April 2020 episode on that woefu...

[School of Movies 2021] The first all-new show for the James Cameron season, and it's a doozy.  You may have heard stories about the troubled events of the shoot, and what the actors and crew were forced to go through by their hard taskmaster of a director. Or you may not have. Many people, especially in their 20s or below might never have seen or even *heard* of this 1989 film, sandwiched between...

[Digital Gonzo 2012] NOTE: This episode has been significantly re-edited, and improved for its 2021 overhaul. The original 2012 show can be found on the School of Movies Archive feed . James Cameron took the helm from Ridley Scott, and made this sequel into something that complimented and expanded upon the masterful original. With more of a Sci-Fi action feel, the director of Avatar, the two best...

[Digital Drift 2015] NOTE: The James Cameron season begins! And rather than making you go back and root through the School of Movies Archive podcast feed for the shows on some of his very best films, we are re-releasing The Terminator and Terminator 2 that we recorded for Digital Drift in 2015. Along with this I have done an extensive re-edit of our 2012 show on Aliens for Digital Gonzo. That will...

[School of Movies 2021] This one came out surprisingly contentious. What was originally, seemingly set to be Marvel powering back into Phase 4 with a new group of superbeings now that The Avengers are on garden leave, actually turned out to be quite a risky endeavour. It's a Space-Odyssey-scaled combination of metaphysical rumination, mature interpersonal relationships, deliberately diverse castin...

[School of Everything Else 2021] One of the best shows on Netflix and one of the finest animated series, very specifically tailored for an adult audience. Castlevania achieves, philosophically speaking, what so many other lesser shows set out to accomplish and find themselves still wanting. It's surprisingly softly spoken, mostly concerned with establishing and developing characters. It's dark and...

[School of Movies 2021] One of the most expensive, vampire films ever made. This first adaptation of Anne Rice's Chronicles ran on star power, lavish costume and set design and a potent strain of existential crisis. It's the tale of Louis, a mourning, bereaved widower who in his despairing malaise meets a sleazy, charismatic, sociopathic vampire named Lestat. For reasons we will go into, Louis dec...

[School of Movies 2021] This show is about both the 1992 original, based on the short story "The Forbidden" by Clive Barker and directed by Bernard Rose, AND the 2021 film directed by Nia DaCosta which shares the name but is in fact both a remake and an in-world sequel.  We decided to gate off all discussion of the new film for the second half of this show, so you can listen to the first half with...

[School of Everything Else 2021] For the first time ever, a direct MCU production really threw me. We've had underachieving films in the past, like the listless Thor: The Dark World, the dramatically unexplorative Ant-Man and The Wasp and starting out with a really serious challenge for our flawed hero before dropping the PTSD ball in the third act with Iron Man 3. Thanos was troublingly handled i...

[School of Movies 2021] We hadn't planned on doing this one so early, but by the time I walked out of the cinema I wanted to finish off the quintet with the same flourish and passion as this film does. It impressed the hell out of me, and then did the same for Sharon. And when we began recording neither of us knew what the other thought, which creates an unusual frisson. No spoilers in these notes...

[School of Movies 2015] NOTE: This is a remastered episode, re-released for 2021. Unlike Skyfall, where I made a handful of tweaks, this one received a heavy edit. Almost an HOUR of the original show was devoted to speculation on what Sony/MGM/EON/Danjaq would do with the *next* Bond film. At the time Daniel Craig seemed to have had enough, and it was very much a possibility that Spectre would be...

[School of Movies 2015] NOTE: This is a remastered episode, re-released for 2021. It's a little tighter, less waffle, more music. The original episode can be found in our Archive feed here . The Craig era, previously discussed back in 2011 gets the royal treatment and we talk Sam Mendez, Roger Deakins, Thomas Newman, Javier Bardem, Ben Wishaw, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Her Majesty, Queen De...

[School of Movies 2021] As I say at the end of this episode, there's a reason why going back to cover these first two Daniel Craig Bonds has been so rich and gratifying for us. Back then they were building a character. Since then, to a degree with Skyfall and definitely with Spectre it has been a case of nudging that more textured character into a comforting template with certain accoutrements tha...

[School of Movies 2021] To coincide with the long-awaited release of No Time to Die we decided to go back to the beginning of Daniel Craig's career as 007. A decade ago I covered the first 22 Bond movies with James Batchelor and Gary Blower, over three mammoth episodes, covering each era. That took us all the way up to Quantum of Solace.  But Sharon wasn't on those, episodes and we only had so muc...

[School of Movies 2021] One of the first huge blockbuster movies made by a western studio with a largely eastern cast, this one really underlines my abiding contention that "Superhero" is not a genre, and neither, as it turns out is "Martial Arts". Would we say Boogie Nights was a "Sex Movie?". Genre is an increasingly blurry construct to help marketers and those who want to know what to watch.  L...

[School of Everything Else 2021] An iconic series of games that has run since 1986 but never really resonated with mass audiences the way that Mario and Sonic did. These are the tales of vampire hunters and the creatures of the night that stand between them and (usually) Dracula.  They have gone through many phases, and we cover each of them here in this mammoth, epic and thoroughly comprehensive...

[School of Everything Else 2021] One of the greatest, most influential TV shows of all time. We watched the whole thing on blu ray, and not only does it hold up, it still surpasses most Batman media. Oftentimes lynchpins like this are hyped and oversaturated to the point where they can hardly live up to the cultural expectations, but this one really does. The first season was a HUGE run of 65 epis...

[School of Movies 2021] Since this theatrically released movie, based on no particular existing IP barely made a couple of hundred million dollars in its first fortnight, statistically speaking that means the majority of you won't have seen it. That's why we're giving you a deep dive episode, delving into the subtext that a lot of folks either took for granted or missed entirely. And far from spoi...