The Cineskinny

The Cineskinny were delighted to be invited back again to Queer Cinema Sundays, the GFT's brilliant monthly film night bringing rarely-screened queer films back to the big screen. First time around, we screened Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime. This time we plumbed for Gregg Araki's 1997 snapshot of disaffected youth, Nowhere.  Set over the course of one wild day, it follows a group of horny a...

Just a couple of episodes ago, we were praising Steven Spielberg as one of our greatest living filmmakers. Then we watched Disclosure Day, and might have to roll back some of those compliments.  We gush over Blue Heron, the extraordinary memory piece from Sophy Romvari. And inspired by Romvari's sophisticated approach to exploring her own childhood experiences – both real and imagined – through ci...

Charlie xcx is a great pop star, but is she any good as an actor? We find out by watching her as the lead in Erupcja, the new low-key relationship drama from director Pete Ohs. In honour of Erupcja, which makes great, lyrical use of its setting of Warsaw, Poland, we consider some of the other films in which the cities they are set in feel like characters in their own right.  We also take a look at...

The full team – Peter, Anahit, Ellie and Jamie – are in the house this week for reviews of crime caper Tuner and chicken-eye-view adventure Hen. And with Steven Spielberg about to release Disclosure Day, his 35th feature-length film, we take a look back at his stacked CV, from the rollercoaster cinema of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark to the awe-inspiring sci-fis ET and Close Encounters to gems...

On this week’s podcast, we check out Normal, which features Bob Odenkirk as a hangdog lawman who's been assigned as the temporary sheriff of a small town in Minnesota called Normal. But, you guessed it, it turns out this sleepy town and its quaint residents aren’t that normal at all. Much punching, shooting and exploding ensues in this B-movie action flick from director Ben Wheatley and writer Der...

We try not to confuse Christian Petzold with his fellow prolific European auteurs François Ozon and Olivier Assayas ahead of our discussion of Miroirs No. 3, Petzold's intriguing new drama about a Berlin pianist (Paula Beer) who gets 'adopted' by a lonely woman after a car crash.  We then take a look at Exit 8, a nifty little thriller based on the simple walking video game of the title, in which y...

During this year's Glasgow Film Festival, we caught up with Cornish filmmaking don Mark Jenkin to discuss his excellent new feature Rose of Nevada, an intriguing time-loop puzzle starring George Mackay and Callum Turner as two young men who find themselves in a time warp when they volunteer to help crew the eponymous fishing boat.  Rose of Nevada is released 24 April by the BFI and Jenkin is curre...

We’ve an actual, bona fide Hollywood movie star on the podcast this week: Professor X himself, James McAvoy. At this year's Glasgow Film Festival, the PR gods granted us ten meagre minutes with McAvoy to discuss his directorial debut, the boisterous stranger-than-fiction tale California Schemin’, about two lads from Dundee who convinced the London music industry they were a rapping duo from LA. Mc...

On this week’s show, we pick over the ashes of the 2026 Academy Awards and ask, why are they so boring? Also Oscar-related, we review the new French animation Arco, which was competing in those awards, but left empty-handed, losing to Netflix sensation KPop Demon Hunters. Did voters make the right call? We also review the curious Polish-British confinement thriller The Good Boy, starring Stephen G...

Everybody To Kenmure Street tells the true story of a community coming together to resist a Home Office immigration raid in Glasgow's Southside in 2021. For this episode, Jamie caught up with its director, Felipe Bustos Sierra, earlier this year to discuss the making of the film, and to talk about the power of solidarity and protest. Everybody To Kenmure Street is out in UK cinemas on Fri 13 March...

With the return of Glasgow Film Festival, we review a quartet of films from the programme. Listen in for our thoughts on Gus van Sant’s 70s crime thriller, Mark Jenkin’s existential fishing boat time-hopper, Pauline Loquès’ small but well-formed debut drama, and Jim Jarmusch’s award-winning ‘parents eh what are they like’ anthology. As a little treat, Anahit slags off "Wuthering Heights", also we...

A packed ep of the pod this time – we look at the recent sudden closure of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, and what it means for Scottish arts in general, and Scottish cinema in specific. Then, we review! The Secret Agent is a knotty, complex sun-drenched conspiracy thriller from Brazil; If I Had Legs I'd Kick You sees Rose Byrne go full power no brakes 100% as a mother at the e...

We've a bumper show for you this week. The soul-destroying crush of capitalism is laid bare in Park Chan-wook's sharp and deliriously funny black comedy No Other Choice. Two of our favourite pretty white boys, Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor, find a deep connection over folk music in 1910s America in The History of Sound. And fresh from the Glasgow Film Festival press launch, the team pick out some...

The Cineskinny rides again, kicking off 2026 with Josh Safdie's excellent Marty Supreme, Chloe Zhao's slightly-less-excellent Hamnet, and the oh-my-no-that-ain't-right finale of Stranger Things. All that, plus Peter Hujar's Day, Blue Moon, a tribute to the late great Rob Reiner and an introduction to the perils of recording in front of a big window. Put the word out there, The Cineskinny is back u...

It's the final episode of The Cineskinny for 2025! And it's the top ten films of the year!  Peter Jamie and Anahit talk through a list with some surprising thematic links, some personal favourites, and a whole bunch of those Good Films we love to talk about. Then, once the dust has settled on the 'proper' part of the podcast, a coda in which we relitigate the whole thing by talking about Some More...

On the penultimate CineSkinny episode of the year, we've got three absolute bangers for you. First up, we take a look at Palme d'Or-winner It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi's powerful moral drama that just got him another unjust jail sentence from the Iranian regime.  Another moral crusader who's been a thorn in his corrupt nation's side is journalist Seymour Hersh. His extraordinary career as...

You’ve had your Jamie and Ellie episode. You’ve had your Peter and Anahit episode. Now it’s a Peter and Jamie combo – possibly sponsored by everyone’s fave streaming service, Tubi. They’ll be discussing the sub-dom-rom-com Pillion, which stars Alexander Skarsgård as a dom biker who takes a shine to Harry Melling’s shy traffic warden. They also dig into the third film in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out s...

It's a fresh new config this week, as Peter and Anahit review a trio of new films – the feral, intense Die My Love; the melancholic, Malick-esque Train Dreams; and Alpha, which is also out soon :| We're a lean, mean reviewin' machine, so strap in for talk about The National, us being infatuated with and scared of Jennifer Lawrence, Peter getting Gene Wilder and Billy Wilder mixed up, and lots of c...

Guillermo del Toro is back, with his long-gestating Frankenstein! Kelly Reichardt is back, with Josh O'Connor-starring art heist drama The Mastermind! The gang is back, and we're in a new office! What a time to be alive on this, The Cineskinny podcast. Oh, and before we forget, listen to our *other* podcast, Music Now – we spoke to Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman about their new score for the Lon...

This week, we take a peek at Plainclothes, a new thriller/romance about a cop whose job involves the entrapment of gay men, which he feels somewhat conflicted about as he himself is secretly gay. We also take a look at Good Boy, an American indie horror about a dog who's trying to save its owner from a supernatural threat.  And with Halloween approaching, we recommend the horror films to catch on...

100 Episodes of The Cineskinny – luckily for such a milestone, the gang are blessed with two very very good films. Paul Thomas Anderson is back with a bang with the sprawling One Battle After Another, and Harris Dickinson's directorial debut Urchin is an annoyingly good first film that blends surrealism and social realism. Elsewhere, we look back on our favourites from The Time of The Podcast, giv...

This week, we’re off to a very near-future Tokyo for Happyend, in which a bunch of clubbing-mad high school teens turn rabblerousers when their headmaster installs a sinister surveillance system in their school, which mirrors the darkening political situation unfolding beyond the school gates. We also take a look at the documentary Power Station, which sees an artist couple try to tackle the fuel...

The pod returns, in sleepy mode – Peter, Anahit and Ellie get caught up on some recent releases, talk through our home set-ups, discuss Films Of 2025 So Far, and go surprisingly in-depth on... Pride & Prejudice and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. The mid-2000s, baby! TIMESTAMPS: What We've Been Watching (recaps on 28 Years Later, Superman and The Office (US)) (2:00) Our favourite places to wa...

While Peter, Anahit and Ellie are off covering the various other festivals happening across Edinburgh this August, Jamie has been attending the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which kicked off in wonderful style on 14 August with Sorry, Baby, the debut feature from Eva Victor, who writes, directs and stars in the film. Sorry, Baby seemed to go down tremendously well with everyone at the ope...

Today! The Edinburgh International Film Festival starts today (if you're listening to this podcast the day it comes out, which you should), so Peter, Jamie and Ellie take a closer look at three films from the programme. We've got Canary Islands-based family mystery Islands, Charlie Shackleton's new metadoc Zodiac Killer Project, and The Golden Spurtle, 75 delightful minutes following the World Por...