School of Movies

[School of Movies 2025] Here is a film we were very excitedly waiting for. We had already been waiting an age for the first Captain Marvel movie in 2019, a project that would have been put into effect had Ike Perlmutter not maintained for years that female-led superhero films wouldn't make money. The thing swept in just over a billion dollars and made a lot of boys on YouTube very cross. Four year...

[School of Movies 2025] This film began life before James Gunn was abruptly fired overnight, by Marvel. It languished for years through the triumph of Endgame, then the Pandemic, and Gunn's hiring by DC to direct their Suicide Squad sequel. The man who came back to pick up the script had been changed, and while Superman (2025) shows the sheer optimistic joy he's capable of imbuing his projects wit...

[School of Everything Else] This one took a lot of consideration. We wanted to separate ourselves from the ragebait YouTubers who decided before it was even out that this was the worst TV show ever made. Even the thumbnail had to be put together in a way that conveys there are problems, but it's not because of BIG ANGRY WOMAN! (Seriously, what is it with basic dudes seeking attention and thumbnail...

[School of Movies 2025] A major milestone in British cinema, pairing up dramatic director Mike Newell with comedy mainstay Richard Curtis. This one is easy to handwave off as fluffy and light, but it is a favourite of one of our psychology-specialising friends Doctor Hunter Mulcare, who joined us for Love Actually and specifically requested that when we covered this film, we have him on as a guest...

[School of Movies 2025] This is a BIG one folks, the first major change in direction for silver screen DC comics adaptations since Nolan's Batman Begins in 2005 (though it has plenty of recent tonal forerunners to back it up, including Aquaman, Blue Beetle and the first Shazam! all of which we recommend seeing as well). This is what Warner Bros. were blushingly groping for in 2017 while trying to...

[School of Everything Else 2025] We return to the Forgotten Realms of Baldur's Gate III and do our best to remember what happened during our games. This time we get to talk about Shadowheart, a cleric who is deeply embroiled in an oppressive cult, in service to Dark Mommy (luckily, she just joined the club). On that note, we talk about character similarities as a strength and a weakness. We talk K...

[School of Everything Else 2025] One of the most ambitious projects for our podcast to date, this commission required the purchase of a PlayStation 5 and presents myself, Sharon and our teenager Willow with a massive and exceptionally dense and rich 80-hour tabletop-style RPG to battle through... each on our own individual quests. To that end, this is the first of three shows covering the celebrat...

[School of Movies 2025] Maybe THE most American of children's properties from the 1980s, G.I. Joe began life as a big doll that boys could dress up for war, but as public sentiment turned against the conflict in Vietnam, Hasbro nudged their chunky action figure towards more of an adventure brand. Then in Reagan's 80s, Joe was relaunched as A Real American Hero, the first massively successful multi...

[School of Movies 2025] All the way back in 2013 when Man of Steel was coming out, I covered the four Christopher Reeve Superman movies on a single podcast with dutiful guests Taylor Nova and Paul Gibson. I recently re-listened to it in the run-up to James Gunn's Superman and I was flabbergasted at how much my attitude had changed; specifically to the first two films directed by Richard Donner and...

[School of Everything Else 2025] It was a long time coming. The remake itself has been mooted as far back as the early 2000s, and the wait for it was half of my life. But then, when this astonishing game finally landed in 2020, a time when we all needed to escape to other worlds, I found myself paralysed with indecision within the game, unable to move for metatextual reasons. Finally returning to...

[School of Movies 2025] An absolutely fascinating 2018 movie where the challenge for the filmmakers was to confine themselves only to a computer screen and the various apps and websites, embodying John Cho's frantically worried David Kim as a blinking cursor, scouring the internet for any trace of his missing teenager Margot. None of this would be anywhere near as riveting if they didn't hook you...

[School of Movies 2025] One of the most astonishing action epics in cinema history, and almost nobody who saw it managed to do so in the cinema! At least in the West. This historical epic, popularised by Netflix plays extremely fast and loose with the facts, reimagining the lives of two of India's most celebrated revolutionaries to have intersected. RRR tells the story of Komaram Bheem, a man of t...

[School of Movies 2025] Two of the most successful films of the 20s, both of them built on the winning formula of bewildered people from the real world being plunged into an alternate dimension which allows them to encounter pleasingly recognisable elements from the video games that general audiences like, on their way towards assisting with deposing a tyrannical warmonger. The problem for us is t...

[School of Everything Else 2025] Neurodivergent elf seeks party for spell-gathering, demon-slaying and appreciating life a whole lot more... Despite our longstanding NO ANIME rule (which nevertheless still allows us to occasionally do shows on the movies we love within that medium, and you folks have been good as gold insofar as overprescribing anime shows when you know it will overwhelm us with v...

[School of Everything Else 2025] Chances are you have neither played nor even heard of this 2024 sci-fi indie game. We hadn't, and as we proceeded through a tale of a dystopia where everyone is cloned from the same person, yet has their own distinct name, outfit and personality, we couldn't see exactly why Hollywoo actress Maya Souris commissioned it... And then we got to Act 3. The prospect of wa...

[School of Everything Else 2025] This is a commissioned show for Chris Finik, The Jonin Monkey, Banzai Tree and Sixblazer. We recruited Willow as a guest, since they were immediately smitten with this 24-episode first season. We heartily recommend you cast aside your worries and just delve into this podcast episode, regardless of having seen the show or not. While you will find out things that are...

[School of Everything Else 2025] One of the most beloved 90s RPGs, and one of the few on Super Nintendo that was released in the UK. So, while I envied Americans for getting Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV and VI, Earthbound and Breath of Fire, THIS ONE was my first actual big console RPG. And it has problems; real playability issues that make it hard to recommend for everyone in the 20s. You'll...

[School of Movies 2025] After the harsh, oppressive atmosphere of I Saw the TV Glow we turn to an altogether funnier tale of trans discovery with Vera Drew's semiautobiographical, anarchic reshaping of DC's Clown Princess of Crime. From the painfully normalising cornfields of Smallville, Kansas comes a child who asks their alarmed mother "Was in born in the wrong body?". The only possible response...

[School of Movies 2025] As soon as we saw this thickly atmospheric, Lynchian lucid nightmare from 2024, Sharon and I knew we had to do a very particular show on it. Since the entire context is trans-anxiety which the majority of cisgender people may find impenetrably mystifying we needed an all-trans/enby/non-cis cast of guests to walk us through the significance. On the surface it is a story abou...

[School of Everything Else 2025] This was an unexpected burst of sheer joy, and we urge you all to seek it out for yourselves. It's a graphic novel, comprising a 7-issue comic book miniseries about wrestling. We had never read a book written by Daniel Warren Johnson before, but now we're hooked and ready to guzzle down everything else this champ achieves. Lona Steelrose was just a little girl when...

[School of Movies 2025] A cult favourite hangout movie about working in a CD shop in the mid-90s. This one was directed by Allan Moyle, who previously helmed another music-centric, coming-of-age teen drama that should have been way more of a hit; Pump Up the Volume (1990). Statistically almost none of you have seen this, as it's the kind of movie you need a good friend to sit you down with after h...

[School of Everything Else 2025] A charming 16-bit style indie adventure game, set in suburban Indonesia in the 1990s. This begins cosy, deliberately evoking the familiar, and swiftly becomes strange and mysterious with a story of loss and grief and loneliness at its core; an ache longing to be relieved. The gameplay involves exploring the town and getting to know the locals, jumping inside their...

[School of Everything Else 2025] A marvellously authentic and creepy modern Survival Horror in the convincing style of a PlayStation One title from the mid-90s conversely featuring inflections of more contemporary scary games. This one is available on Steam and Switch and PS4 and Xbox Series X. There is an abandoned theme park to explore and mysteries to uncover, as we structure this episode into...

[School of Everything Else 2025] One of the most beloved, instantly-transformative, replayed, re-released, and critically acclaimed games of all time... and would you believe until preparing for this show, that I wasn't massively fussed about it? But this year I have been replaying all of the original games sequentially, and after the first era of fixed-camera tank controls transitioned into the a...

[School of Everything Else 2025] All the way back in 2017 I put together an absolutely EPIC musical journey through the first eight years of the MCU, from Iron Man all the way up to Doctor Strange. So much time has passed since then (cue many gifs of Matt Damon drinking from the wrong Grail) and Marvel has not followed my sound advice about allowing each hero (and maybe a villain or two) to retain...