Two Reel Cinema Club

As George W Bush famously once asked, ‘Is our children learning?’ Join us in the specially commissioned TRCC Popcorn Counter Lecture Theatre as we celebrate our 100th episode. There we try to distill the lessons we’ve garnered from recording two years of podcasts into ten condensed nuggets of insight. Has all that viewing and talking about films made us any wiser, or just hoarser? Can we apply the...

After watching Dogtooth recently, we’re convinced that endings are hard. Or are they? Join us at the Popcorn Counter as we take a look at movie endings good and bad from the history of cinema, Including: John Sayles’ Limbo, Birdman, The Long Good Friday, North by Northwest, Planet of the Apes, Fight Club, Top Gun Maverick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Libertine. (…How do you like us now?) If you...

A new Hayao Miyazaki film from Studio Ghibli has appeared! The Boy and the Heron is the master animator’s first feature length work in more than ten years, and on this week’s episode we dive deep into its mysterious, dreamlike world and measure it up against what might be the studio’s greatest feature, 1988’s My Neighbour Totoro. It’s no great surprise to find a lot of common ground here, with bot...

How many times has Frankenstein been made into a movie? More times than we remember, it turns out. There’s Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein 2, yes, yes, yes. But what about Robocop? The Fly? The Six Million Dollar Man? Even one of our own scripts was a Frankenstein story. What does Frankenstein have in common with socialism? And what connects Mary Shel...

What happens when you put the brain of a baby in the body of an adult woman? You get Sexy Frankenstein, apparently. At least that’s the opinion of the new Yorgos Lanthimos picture Poor Things starring Emma Stone, which is out in the UK this week. We’re comparing it to Lanthimos’ 2009 feature, Dogtooth, which first brought him to international prominence. And it turns out there’s plenty of common g...

Ines Braga hangs out at the Popcorn Counter with us this week, where she confesses that she really doesn’t like musicals. But there are a few notable exceptions, including last week’s masterpiece West Side Story. Is there a rule that distinguishes good movie musicals from bad ones? Why do The Lion King, Frozen and Moana succeed where others do not? Is it possible to go wrong when you have the Beat...

Tonight, tonight, we’re joined by screenwriter Ines Braga to sing a song of two musical pictures, the new Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, helmed by A Star is Born director Bradley Cooper, and Bernstein’s own 1961 masterpiece, West Side Story. They’re both very enjoyable, but which one has more to say about contemporary la la la la la l’America? Which one paints the most vivid picture of toxic ma...

It’s the show we’ve been anticipating for the last twelve months, the Two Reel Cinema Club Film of the Year Show. We’ve seen some masterpieces this year, we’ve seen some real clunkers, we’ve seen some incredible performances and we’ve seen some very eye catching hats. Who will win, who will get a dishonourable mention, and who will leave the ceremony emotional, drunk and bitter as their personal s...

Happy Holidays from the Two Reel Cinema Club, as we watch one of the funniest, dourest and most heartfelt Christmas films we’ve seen in years, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. We discover it perched under the mistletoe kissing a film forty years its senior, 1983’s English private school drama Another Country. These two films both examine privilege, wealth and class, while simultaneously exploring...

You might think we saw enough hats for one lifetime last week in Napoleon and Barry Lyndon but no, we want more. Join us as we doff our hats to the finest headgear in Hollywood. Which is the most famous hat in cinema? Who has the biggest hat in the MCU? How did cowboys decide between a black and a white hat? What hat did Zack Braff force Natalie Portman to wear in Garden State? And which of us has...

Join us in the Eighteenth Century this episode as we compare the new Ridley Scott feature Napoleon with its 1975 forefather, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It’s an explosion of candlelight and costume design, huge battles and intimate character moments. But it does make us wonder: why is the French Language no longer the Lingua Franca of cinema? What exactly are drummers for on the battle field?...

Persepolis, Watchmen, Ghost World, American Splendor, Akira, Gemma Bovary… can you see the pattern yet? After watching David Fincher’s The Killer last week, we look at films that have been adapted from graphic novels. Which ones work, and which ones don’t? And what’s the common factor that makes a good adaptation? Plus, we talk about Paul Giamatti and Scarlett Johansson, falling asleep while Tokyo...

Two films, two assassins, and two hundred thousand bullets this episode, as we watch the new David Fincher film The Killer and compare it to John Woo’s 1989 breakout Hong Kong action spectacular The Killer. There’s no denying the technical craft on display here, but while there’s a lot of bloodshed is there perhaps a little too much rumination? Which of these films should really be described as a...

It’s not just a feeling in your bladder, it’s actually true. Films really are getting longer. After struggling with the length of Killers of the Flower Moon last week, we analyse a few statistics about how film length has changed in the last forty years. Is it to do with length of a VHS tape? Or is the rise of streaming to blame, like it is for everything else? Are ‘event films’ the only reason pe...

We take two dark journeys into the American West in this episode as we watch the new Martin Scorsese picture Killers of the Flower Moon, and compare it to Sergio Leone’s 1969 classic Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s an epic total of six hours of gunshots, dirt, crime, money, corruption and revenge, all in Cinemascope. But which film is a textbook in cinematic story telling? Does either film just...

After watching Sliding Doors and Past Lives the other week, you find us writing our own romcom at the Popcorn Counter this episode. We ask ourselves: how many tropes can we squeeze into one pitch? The answer seems to be all of them, as we fold mismatched undercover cops, crazy best friends, a high stakes bake off, dance lessons on the beach, a wedding at a castle, a tiny car, kissing in the rain a...

Watching Blackberry last week made us wonder how many hours of cinema are watched on a tiny, pocket-sized smartphone screen these days. Now that many of us have a fifty five inch OLED at home, are the days of cinema numbered? What will become of the experience of watching a movie in a big, dark room full of strangers? Will VR headsets and short form video kill movie going, or will new innovations...

We get down to business at the Two Reel Cinema Club this episode, as we watch the very entertaining new Canadian comedy-drama Blackberry, which explores the multi-billion-dollar early days of the smartphone, and compare it to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood. They’re two stories about big money, separated by a century, but with many touchstones in common. But which film...

Money is all we can think about at the popcorn counter this week, after watching two films about money last week. What are our top five financial films of all time? And can we answer five trivia questions about the insanity of film financing? What film made the most money, who got the biggest payday ever, and what clunker lost the most money? Do we prefer films about stealing money or saving it? A...

We’re losing money hand over fist in this week’s episode. Or maybe making money? Or buying… um… options? We have no idea what we’re doing to be honest, but neither do many of the protagonists in this week’s films. Dumb Money, from the director of Cruella, is the first film we’ve ever seen that’s based on a Reddit thread, and is a surprisingly funny and warm hearted comedy about money that ends up...

Spencer Brown, director and co-writer of T.I.M., the number one Netflix feature, joins us at the Popcorn Counter this episode, to discuss the making of his film about an AI companion that becomes the world’s most effective and threatening stalker. He has some fascinating insights into the writing process and his methods of collaboration with his wife, best selling novelist Sarah Govett. But what w...

Join us on the road not taken this episode, as we watch new Korean-American feature Past Lives and compare it to a very 90s take on similar themes in Sliding Doors. Past Lives is like a tiny serving of understated New York drama, filled with comfortable silences and autobiographical details. But we have to ask: does enough actually happen? Meanwhile, London based Sliding Doors might have the oppos...

There have been more than 450 spy films released in the last 12 months* (*citation needed) and yet most spy films seem to involve very little actual spying. James Bond has spent vastly more of his career running, driving, shooting and drinking than he has LOOKING AT THINGS CAREFULLY. At the popcorn counter this week we ask which spy films get it right and which do not. Which is the best Bond film?...

TRCC favourite Tom Cruise returns this episode, as we look at Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part One, the seventh film in the ever growing franchise, and compare it to the 1935 Hitchcock classic The 39 Steps. Trains, chases, handcuffs and the very latest technology pepper the screen with bullet holes in both films, even though they were made 88 years apart. But which film nearly ended Andres...

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, last week’s film, is now broadly acknowledged as The Greatest Film Of All Time. Do we agree? And what, to quote LL Cool J, is on our lists of the Greatest Of All Time? Will we include works by Kubrick, Hitchcock and the Cohen Brothers, or will we play it safe and stick to Zack Snyder? How many of our favourites are not in English? How many of them are suitable...