Eavesdropping at the Movies

In 2023, Warner Bros. announced the completion of Coyote vs. Acme, a family film in which Looney Tunes' Wile E. Coyote, still desperately and valiantly chasing the Road Runner, sues the Acme Corporation for selling defective products. They also announced that the film would not be released, preferring to claim a tax loss of some $30 million against it. Those who'd seen the film described how good...

Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinematic deconstructions. It tells the story of a young, queer, indie filmmaker hired to resurrect a problematic slasher series of yesteryear, the Camp Miasma films, which feature a box-headed villain who peri...

Half a century since its 1972 release, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret remains startlingly sexy, funny and politically unsettling. We admire Liza Minnelli’s extraordinary star-making performance, the film’s distinctive choreography and cinematography, and how the Kit Kat Klub, and the numbers performed within, chart the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Berlin. We also consider its unusually liberated treatment of s...

The End of Oak Street puts Mike in mind of the sort of disposable but likeable films he watched on video as a child, although they didn't tend to cost $85 million to make. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell conspicuously apes Steven Spielberg with a family, a suburb, a dinosaur invasion, a large pile of poo and a lot of 1980s nostalgia. We debate whether the film’s derivativeness, charmless per...

We've tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021's No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to...

Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer's ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven't seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of...

Steven Spielberg returns to science fiction with Disclosure Day, an ambitious alien thriller that consciously recalls Close Encounters of the Third Kind, still one of his defining films fifty years on. We marvel at its extraordinary visual storytelling, virtuoso camerawork and sense of cinematic wonder, while asking whether its ideas about conspiracy, religion, the media and empathy are as sophist...

Most videogames that receive cinematic adaptations are big - the likes of Uncharted, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and Resident Evil, all of which have been adapted, some several times, are among the biggest games in history, and their cinematic versions are typically intended to be blockbusters. Exit 8 is not. It is an independent Japanese game made by one person, turned into a low-budget, high-c...

Seven years ago, we disagreed with the thrust of what Mark Jenkin's Bait had to say about the world as it is and as it ought to be, but appreciated its expressive strength. It was a film with substance. You could grapple with it. Rose of Nevada broadly conveys the same messages, but, as they derive primarily from the film's setting and less so its plot, is less forceful and argumentative about the...

In 2015, Matt Damon found himself stranded on Mars in The Martian, an adaptation of Andy Weir's novel of the same name, and had to improvise unlikely solutions in order to survive and get home. In 2026, Ryan Gosling finds himself stranded in outer space in Project Hail Mary, an adapation of Andy Weir's novel of the same name, and has to improvise unlikely solutions in order to save Earth and get h...

Sirât is all about tone, and the time it takes to establish it. It begins with an array of massive speakers being set up in a desert, and over the next several minutes, we experience an outdoor rave, the music trance-inducing, the ravers moving freely and in their own worlds, as we gradually narrow our focus on an out-of-place father, Luis, and his young son, who we learn are searching for his dau...

We've previously seen Bacurau, writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho's last film, which we loved, and find The Secret Agent a similarly fascinating depiction of political corruption and persecution in Brazil, though much more grounded and fleshed out, particularly given the historical setting in 1977, at which time Brazil was subject to a military dictatorship. To José, who grew up in Franco's Spa...

Those to whom Emily Brontë's only novel, Wuthering Heights, is important, have approached Emerald Fennell's adaptation warily. It's a book that a lot of women have grown up on, and the trailers raised questions. Would it be too steamy? Too modernised? Would it miss the point? We, however, residing outside that demographic and never having read the novel, can't meaningfully consider the issue of ad...

Send Help sees Rachel McAdams marooned on a desert island with her asshole boss in a cartoonishly gory comic adventure the likes of which made director Sam Raimi's name. We discuss how feminist it really is - at the very least, it's a bloke's idea of female empowerment - and praise McAdams' and Dylan O'Brien's performances, upon which the entire film relies. Recorded on 15th February 2026.

Possibly the sweetest and lightest gay BDSM biker film ever made, Pillion opens up conversations on power dynamics, consent and boundaries, and made Mike cry. Everything about it is so assured, particularly Harry Melling's understated protagonist, meek and new to BDSM; Alexander Skarsgård's commanding, mysterious lover; and Harry Lighton's direction, the control of tone he exhibits a remarkable ac...

One of Iran's most celebrated filmmakers, Jafar Panahi, has spent the last quarter of a century in conflict with the Iranian government, which objects to his films' criticisms of their actions and the wider social conditions in the country, and has both arrested him several times and banned him from making films for twenty years - which hasn't stopped him. His latest, It Was Just an Accident, won...

Russell Crowe shines in Nuremberg as Hermann Göring, who became the face of the Nazi Party following Hitler's suicide and the end of the war, as he's held in custody and probed by a psychiatrist as the titular trials approach. Indeed, while a mediocre film, its actors' performances are a pleasure - with the exception of Rami Malek, whose psychiatrist is twitchy, busy, and a failure. A shame that h...

Jennifer Lawrence gives a career-best performance as a new mother struggling with depression and a rocky relationship in Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay, whose remarkable instinct for tone and atmosphere shouldn't be taken for granted. It's a character study whose artistry is all in the filmmaking and performances, which bring out great richness of feeling in material that, on the page, migh...

Yorgos Lanthimos' fourth collaboration with Emma Stone yields a darkly comedic thriller about two conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO, determined to reveal the truth that she's an alien from Andromeda. We've all at least considered it. While funny and absurd, Bugonia is also tragic and misanthropic, and we're unconvinced that its ending is either earned or fitting, despite Mike's insistence that...

Another classic Gothic horror is remade for the modern age: first we saw Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, and now Guillermo del Toro brings us his adaptation of Frankenstein. Like Nosferatu, Frankenstein is astonishing to look at, and, like Nosferatu, also written by its director, it probably would have benefitted from the attention of a professional screenwriter. Still, it's a pleasure to spend time in...

Far from an outstanding film, but amazing to look at and too much fun not to recommend, we had a great time in Tron: Ares, which reverses the reality-computer interface that brought humans into the digital world in the previous two films; it's now the virtual that becomes real. An evil company searches for the code that will give its 3D printed computer assets longevity in the real world - so far,...

We're joined by our resident Paul Thomas Anderson expert (and Mike's brother), Stephen Glass, to whom we've previously spoken about Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, for another discussion of One Battle After Another. Stephen's seen it in both VistaVision and IMAX 70mm, and can offer a sense of the experience Mike and José missed seeing it in IMAX Digital, and so begins a wide-ranging conversatio...

Mike isn't impressed with The Rock's attempt to take on a dramatic role in an intimate biopic after decades of popcorn blockbusters, seeing it as Oscar bait. José doesn't share his cynicism and likes the lead performance. We discuss what The Smashing Machine depicts - disagreeing, in particular, about whether the protagonist shares any blame for the issues in his relationship - as well as whether...

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, directed by former video essayist Kogonada, is beautiful to look at and very likeable, but derivative and ultimately unsatisfying. We discuss its lighting, its attitude towards people's histories and the memories that live with them, and why a rubbish script Mike once wrote makes him particularly keen to sneer at it. Recorded on 29th September 2025.

Cheap, simple, high-concept and reasonably graphic, The Long Walk is a throwback to the days of the B-movie. In its dystopian, totalitarian version of the USA, an annual event, the Long Walk, is designed to inspire a work ethic and national pride in the citizenry, and in so doing restore the country to that self-defined global number one status it craves; to make America great again. The televised...