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Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode celebrate 40 years of Film4 with a quartet of famous film-makers who have been part of its rich history and legacy. Founded in 1982, Film4 soon became an iconic and vital voice in British film. It has fostered a reputation for producing gritty, diverse stories from unheard voices as well as championing the more leftfield and experimental side of British cinema. Ellen...

To mark the 80th birthday of one of cinema’s most enigmatic and polarising characters, Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones explore the work, myth and legacy of Werner Herzog. An encounter with Herzog is always compelling, and sometimes risky. When Mark interviewed him in the Hollywood Hills in 2006, the director was shot - an incident he dismissed as ‘not significant’. From the safe distance of a few t...

From the Old Testament to Captain Underpants, via Jane Austen and pulp fiction, the relationship between the page and the screen is unbreakable. But the journey from book to screenplay can be a long and winding road that is sometimes paved with gold, and often filled with detours and potholes. To get under the skin of literary adaptations, Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones decamped to the Hay literar...

Fifty years ago a break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington DC caused a cover-up that ultimately cost Richard Nixon the presidency. From the moment the hearings into the scandal were televised, there has been a massive audience for all things Watergate. There have been feature films, plays, podcasts, online comedy series, documentaries and TV dramas. Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode investigat...

Ahead of Jamaican Independence Day, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode immerse themselves in one of the island’s greatest exports, The Harder They Come, marking the film’s 50th anniversary. The Harder They Come was a sensation, but it took a while for its vibrations to be heard around the world. In 1972, the premiere in Kingston brought the area to a complete standstill. Outside of Jamaica, the film h...

Ellen and Mark discuss the enduring screen presence of Elvis Presley, from Love Me Tender to Wild at Heart. One of the most hotly anticipated films this summer is Elvis - director Baz Luhrmann’s biopic chronicling the singer’s career and complicated relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker. Committed Presley fan Mark discusses Elvis’ prolific acting career with a couple of fellow obsessives -...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore big budget flops, from Ishtar to Cats. Ishtar – writer and director Elaine May's huge budget comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman – was released in May 1987. The film, about a pair of incompetent singer-songwriters who become entangled in a CIA plot in north Africa, tanked at the box office and ultimately put paid to May's directing career. In the...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode celebrate one of the great doyennes of Hollywood in what would have been her centenary year. Cultural historian Christopher Frayling joins Mark to revisit the rare career retrospective interview he conducted with Day in 1989. And Ellen speaks to Queer cinema expert Emma Smart and singer Rufus Wainwright about the importance of both Doris Day and Judy Garland, who wou...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore the history of indigenous and native people on screen. In 1922, silent film Nanook of the North was released. Written, directed and filmed by a white man, the docudrama claimed to show the daily life of an Inuit hunter and his family in the Canadian Arctic - but all wasn't quite as it seemed. A century on, Screenshot explores the representation of indigenous...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore cinema's steamiest genre - the erotic thriller - 30 years on from the release of Basic Instinct. Mark reappraises recent best director Oscar-winner Jane Campion's oft-overlooked 2003 erotic thriller In The Cut, with the help of the film's author and co-screenwriter Susanna Moore and the film critic Maria San Filippo. And Ellen speaks to film historian Karina...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore the influence of David Simon and The Wire, as the Baltimore-set opus celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Beginning his career as a police reporter for the much respected Baltimore Sun, David Simon eventually became disillusioned with changes being made at the paper and spent a year embedded with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit. That res...

Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones explore Christianity on screen, from faith films to nunsploitation. Mark speaks to priest Father Peter Malone and controversial director Paul Verhoeven about two very different cinematic depictions of the crucifixion - Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. And Ellen takes a look at nuns in the movies, from The Bells of St...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode jump on board to explore the role of trains on our screens. This week sees the release of Compartment No 6 - a strange and touching romance set on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Trains have played a recurring role in film, right from the inception of the genre. Mark is joined by silent film specialist Bryony Dixon and composer Neil Brand to talk about the appeal of the...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore hoaxes, fakes and pranks on screen for April Fool's Day. Mark is joined by documentarian Morgan Neville and Anna Bogutskaya for a deep dive into Orson Welles’ 1973 docudrama about forgers and fakery, F for Fake. And Ellen looks back at small screen hoaxes, from the 1970s sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the terrifying BBC1 Halloween drama Ghostwatch via a...

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is released in the UK on 31 January. This feature length documentary provides a rare window into the first years of the ground-breaking children’s TV show.   Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode embrace the nostalgia of the television that shaped their childhoods.   Mark explores the impact of Sesame Street with Street Gang’s director, Marilyn Agrelo. He also ref...

The adrenaline-inducing film Boiling Point is out in cinemas and online. Shot in a single take on a single night at a London restaurant, the movie has inspired Ellen and Mark to take a closer look at one-shot films and those that appear to be. What does the one-shot do for a movie? Is it any more than showing off? Boiling Point stars Stephen Graham as an under-pressure chef whose life is unravelli...

Film noir Nightmare Alley is released next week. It's director Guillermo del Toro's remake of the 1947 film - a baroque tale of carnival hucksters, psychiatrists and betrayal. Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore the connections sparked by Nightmare Alley and film noir. Mark speaks to Guillermo del Toro about his five favourite classic noir films, including Fallen Angel and Born to Kill. And Ell...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore David Bowie's impact on cinema. Musician, actor, performer and all-round icon David Bowie would have turned 75 on Saturday 8th January. To mark the occasion, the British Film Institute have launched a month-long season celebrating his work in film and television, from The Man Who Fell To Earth to Labyrinth. Ellen talks to V&A curator Victoria Broackes and...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore New Year’s Eve on film and TV, peering into the dark and the dawn either side of the stroke of midnight. Mark looks back at director Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial 1995 film Strange Days, a dark tech-thriller set on New Year’s Eve 1999, and coursing with millennial anxieties. He revisits an interview with Bigelow recorded on the film’s release, and speaks to...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore festive screen favourites for Christmas Eve. It’s the 75th anniversary of a beloved film that has come to dominate our screens over the holiday period - director Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.  Like James Stewart’s George Bailey, who is shown what the world would look like without him by guardian angel Clarence, Ellen learns what subsequent screen cultu...

Crowd pleasers Squid Game and Bridgerton could not be further apart in subject matter, but they are currently the two most streamed programmes in Netflix’s history. We get under the bonnet and behind the mask of these phenomena by examining their precedents on both the big and small screen, tracing how previous works have covered similar themes in so many different ways. Ellen looks at the death-m...

France’s entry for this year's Oscars is the extraordinary Titane. Beginning as a Cronenbergian body horror movie, Titane constantly plays with genre, while simultaneously dealing with themes of grief, gender identity, and queerness. The film also features scenes depicting mechanophilia - a sexual attraction to machines. Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones explore the multiple cinematic connections and...

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is released on 10 December - the director’s long-delayed, big-budget remake of the influential screen classic, first released 60 years ago. Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore the cinematic connections sparked by this ground breaking musical film. West Side Story transplants Romeo & Juliet’s star-crossed lovers and warring tribes from Renaissance Italy to...

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode guide us through the expanding universe of the moving image revealing fascinating links and hidden gems from cinema and TV to streaming and beyond.