The Cinematologists Podcast

The voice in cinema is a phenomenon that is in many ways taken for granted. Since the advent of the talkies, the speaking voice synchronised to the human body on-screen is the ingrained process for narrative exposition and character development. However, this accepted synchronisation is one of sound cinema’s fundamental illusions. This major production for The Cinematologists features the analysis...

Part Two of our Berlinale 2020 special is here. You’d think that after 5 years doing this podcast I’d get a little thing like the audio right, but alas, a couple of my solo recordings here are of a very poor quality - lots of peaking and distortion, which I have tried hard to reduce. Apologies. The content is still pretty good though methinks. Lots of chat with Dario about films including the awar...

It's Berlinale time. Our annual sojourn to our favourite European Film Festival is one of the highlights of the year, and the programme looks intriguing with a host of big names in arthouse cinema showing their latest work. This is the first of a two-part episode in which we bring our thoughts to bear on the big competition entries, as well as fiction and documentary films from other sections of B...

Adam Mars-Jones is an award-winning novelist and critic. His most recent novel, Box Hill, won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo novel prize . An apt award for someone who is also one of Britain’s most erudite and singular voices in film criticism. In late 2019 a collection of his film criticism, Second Sight , was published. It collects a significant portion of his reviews from his days as The Independent’s f...

Recorded at Luton’s Filmstock Film Festival (co-directed by Neil) in November 2019, this series features long-form conversations with filmmakers recorded specially for the podcast. Thanks to The School of Film & Television at Falmouth University for sponsoring this strand of Filmstock to enable these conversations to take place. The series features conversations with directors Jeanie Finlay and Ki...

Recorded at Luton’s Filmstock Film Festival (co-directed by Neil) in November 2019, this series features long-form conversations with filmmakers recorded specially for the podcast. Thanks to The School of Film & Television at Falmouth University for sponsoring this strand of Filmstock to enable these conversations to take place. The series features conversations with directors Jeanie Finlay and Ki...

Recorded at Luton’s Filmstock Film Festival (co-directed by Neil) in November 2019, this series features long-form conversations with filmmakers recorded specially for the podcast. Thanks to The School of Film & Television at Falmouth University for sponsoring this strand of Filmstock to enable these conversations to take place. The series features conversations with directors Jeanie Finlay and Ki...

In the final episode of season 10, we look back over 2019 with film highlights we wanted to discuss again. This is not a ranking or a best of, merely a celebration of the year in film and our personal choices of the work we think should be seen and discussed. Here's a list of all the films on our agenda: Ad Astra; Amazing Grace; Apollo 13; Atlantics; Bait; Burning; Capernaum; Dolemite is My Name;...

The second of instalment of our BFI Musicals two-parter sees Neil and Dario take a deep dive into the glorious world of Barbra Streisand. Neil was invited to Plymouth Arts Centre to take part in the Reclaim The Frame screening of Funny Girl (a film neither Neil nor Dario had seen), hosted by Mia Bays and the brilliant Birds Eye View organisation. This episode sees Neil and Dario discuss the stardo...

The first of our episodes in partnership with the BFI’s Blockbuster season on Musicals finds us discussing our relationship to the genre and its descendants as well as responding to a series of interviews conducted by Neil over the last couple of months. Guests on this special episode are the critic/historian Pamela Hutchinson who gives a brilliant overview of the musical form and suggests some ge...

Today's episode features a raft of interviews recorded a Filmstock12 , the Luton film festival organised by Neil with his long-time collaborator Justin Doherty, which returned this year after a 10-year hiatus. Fiercely proud of his Luton roots, Neil talks to Dario about the origins of the festival, the programming ethos, why it came back this year, and what it represents as a cultural marker for L...

  In another first for the Cinematologists, we are hugely excited to present The Lobster with a live score from the classical group the Solem Quartet  and in association with Picturehouses cinemas. Live cinema events featuring musical accompaniments are becoming more prevalent as part of the auditorium experience; they echo cinema's past but also a look to the future as audiences seek out material...

  In our first episode from Filmstock 12 - the Luton based film festival organised by Neil in collaboration with Justin Doherty - we are delighted to welcome back on the podcast director Mark Jenkin. In this live Q&A Mark talks to Dario about his incredible year and the success of Bait, which has been met with universal critical acclaim and considerable box office success. That a black and white h...

  For episode 90 Dario and Neil go old school for the film and the format. In this classically structured episode the focus of attention is on the 1994 action classic Speed, screened for the Film at Falmouth 2019 Freshers audience at The Poly in Falmouth. The discussion ranges across contemporary and classic action movies and stars including Harrison Ford, Arnie, The Stath, Cruise, Aliens, Dredd a...

When we heard that a documentary about the art of film sound was being released we simply had to check it out. Fortuitously, the film was playing at this year's London Film Festival and we were lucky enough to be able to interview the film's director Midge Costin. Midge has an unbelievable C.V. herself as a sound editor working on many of the big action movies of the 80s and 90s including The Rock...

  While the London Film Festival is fresh in the mind, The Cinematologists bring you this round-up of some of the best films in this year's event. In order to help with this task, we have enlisted two smart and articulate young film critics to give their in-depth, considered opinions. Dario talks to Savina Petkova ( MubiNotebook , Electric Ghost Magazine, Girls on Tops Tees ) and James Maitre ( Di...

We’re back with the second of our double bill of episodes from the Film-Philosophy Conference held at the University of Brighton in July. Hosted by our very own Dario Llinares the event boasted an internationally renowned line-up of keynotes and delegates.  Both episodes are made up of interviews we managed to grab as the conference progressed and, we hope gives you a sense of the eclectic mix of...

Season 10 of the Cinematologists podcast kicks off with a double bill of episodes from the Film-Philosophy Conference held at the University of Brighton in July. Hosted by our very own Dario Llinares the event which boasted an internationally renowned line-up of keynotes and delegates.  Both episodes are made up of interviews we managed to grab as the conference progressed and, we hope gives you a...

This repost features director Mark Jenkin whose new release Bait opened last Friday (29th August 2019) to almost universal praise. Back in February 2016 Mark joined Dario at the Electric Palace in Hastings to screen and discuss the film. The story of a young man striving to provide a home for himself, his pregnant girlfriend and their unborn child, Bronco's House is an aesthetic meditation on prop...

It's our final episode of the season and in response to a request from one of our listeners Andrew Peirce ( www.thecurb.com ), we discuss the powerful outback western Sweet Country. Directed by Warwick Thornton and inspired by the true events, the film is a brutal indictment of the colonial terrorism that forged modern Australia and the specific impact on Aboriginal existence, identity and culture...

The latest episode sees The Cinematologists going deep on some of the central conversations in contemporary film culture, joined by the peerless So Mayer & Girish Shambu.  Coinciding with So's 'A Queer Toolkit for Blowing Up The Canon' talk at HOME in Manchester, and Girish visiting the UK for the Queer & Feminist Cinephilia Workshop at the University of Birmingham, Neil talked to them both about...

Scott Barley makes sublime, juddering, immersive, multi-sensory films. They drift across an experimental, nature doc, slow cinema axis - sometimes with brute force and sometimes with an aching tranquility. In a few years he has amassed a formidable filmography of short film work and in 2017 presented his debut feature, Sleep Has Her House , to the world. In late 2018, Scott travelled to the School...

Both Neil and I are avid users of the typewriter so when we got the chance to speak to Doug Nichol the director of the 2017 documentary California Typewriter, it was a great chance to wax lyrical about the virtues of this 'obsolete' technology. On the surface, the film could have been overly nostalgic or, heaven forbid, dripping with retro hipsterism, but following the owner and staff of a repair...

The year is 2027, the world has collapsed but Britain soldiers on. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men has seemingly only increased in significance and appreciation since its release in 2006. Based loosely on a P.D. James novel Cuarón imagines a world that has lost hope because of human infertility but this only the narrative starting point for an aesthetically and thematically layered dystopian nigh...

Dr Racquel Gates is assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the College of Staten Island. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018). For the latest episode, Racquel talked to Neil about her book and a number of other topics including contemporary black screen art and criticism, Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Whoopi Goldberg, Black cultural schola...