Eavesdropping At The Movies

Mike loves Tim Key. This much has been true for some time, and he's thrilled to discover that the comic poet's unique approach to wordplay and social interactions finds a natural place on the cinema screen, in the character of an eccentric lottery winner who lures his favourite folk duo, long since broken-up, to the lonely island on which he lives for a private gig. Tom Basden's singer-songwriter finds the forced reunion an unwelcome intrusion from his past, and so begins a comedy about grief, loss, loneliness, and rice. The plot is easily predicted, the visual nous close to absent, but it has a good heart and, in Key, an irresistably energetic, unusual central performance. It filled the Mockingbird with laughter and left us all feeling warm and cuddly and sad and happy. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a charming film, well worth watching. Recorded on 5th August 2025.

We talk adult male friendships, stress and surreality in our discussion of Friendship, in which oddball everyman Tim Robinson finds himself enamoured with effortlessly cool new neighbour Paul Rudd, but lacks any of the social nous to naturally bond with him. The film gets huge laughs from meaningful subject matter, a far cry from our experience with The Naked Gun. Its tone is idiosyncratic, its observations on human nature ring true in their exaggerated way, and Robinson is a fascinating and hilarious presence on the cinema screen. Friendship won't be for everyone, but we highly recommend it. Recorded on 4th August 2025.

The Naked Gun is rebooted with Liam Neeson in the part that was once Leslie Nielsen's, and he shows just how hard comedy can be. We discuss everything the film gets wrong. If only they'd asked us for help. Recorded on 4th August 2025.

YouTubers-turned-directors Danny and Michael Philippou demonstrate a real eye for visual design and an ability to create imagery to truly disgusting effect in Bring Her Back, in which Sally Hawkins plays a foster parent whose daughter's death leads her to search for answers in the occult. The filmmaker twins are 32 years old, which, perhaps unfairly, leads us to ascribe the film's lack of depth and prioritisation of visual shock to their youth. Bring Her Back shows a certain immaturity, but great potential, and we're interested to see if the pair's storytelling and sensitivity to theme improves. We also discuss child actors in horror, as the film drives Mike to question the ethics of using children as Jonah Wren Phillips is here, both in terms of the desired effect on the audience and the potential unintended effect on the child. Not all unease is good unease, and Bring Her Back makes us ask: what cost is too high for such entertainment? Recorded on 28th July 2025.

The seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) series, Jurassic World Rebirth might be the first of the sequels to really come close to capturing the kind of wonder, excitement and horror that the 1993 original offered. That might be in part because it cribs liberally from it, with both moments and entire sequences closely evocative of their 32-year-old counterparts. But there's plenty else that's new here, and Rebirth is a characterful expansion to the Jurassic Park story. Thoughts of containment have finally been totally discarded - dinosaurs have now been roaming the Earth for some time, to the point that they're dying out everywhere other than a narrow band around the equator, which is illegal for human travel. So that's where we're headed, of course, as a pharmecutical exec seeking to make a fortune from dino-sourced drugs hires a team of mercenaries to extract blood from three creatures: one that swims, one that walks, and one that flies. It's a decent structure that tells you what to

DC, which for the best part of two decades has failed to put together a cinematic universe of comic book adaptations to rival Marvel's MCU, regroups and goes again with director James Gunn in charge of what will be known as the DCU - and what better superhero to introduce the new brand than the original: Superman. David Corenswet's performance and physique are extremely appealing, recalling an era before steroids and dehydration were considered compulsory in order for a man to be thought of as sexy. We appreciate the film's lightness of tone and sense of humour, although one of us argues that the whole experience is so audiovisually hyperactive and loud that the tone doesn't support all the jokes, and it's simply exhausting to endure. We also discuss wokeness, the right wing's determination to have a culture war, and obvious parallels between Lex Luthor's villainy and that of Donald Trump; destruction of cities and the concomitant human cost; what made the previous Lex Luthor interesting; and why putting on

Hollywood collaborates with the FIA, the motorsport governing body, to try to convince us that Formula One is not, in fact, televised Microsoft Excel, but actually very exciting indeed. To this end, it brings in accomplished genre action director Joseph Kosinski, star Brad Pitt, and every cliché under the sun. And it's great fun. There's hardly anything realistic about this story of a sixtysomething has-been given an unexpected shot at glory in racing's most prestigious competition, despite the extraordinary effort that's been made to evoke the world of F1, including shooting during real races and race events, with real drivers filling the scenes and even the real commentary team of Crofty and Brundle talking us through the action. The ironic curse of such detail is that the audience most attuned to recognising it is precisely that which will take issue with the film's inaccuracies; José, on the other hand, doesn't know F1 from a hole in the ground, and has no such problem. We discuss the incredibly intense

In the 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl infamously directed two propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, for the Nazi Party. For the rest of her life, which ended in 2003, she denied knowledge of the regime's crimes, including the Holocaust. In 2016, her heirs gave her estate, which included a vast collection of personal documents, correspondence, and film and tape recordings, to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which itself gave permission to Sandra Maischberger and Andres Veiel, a journalist and filmmaker respectively, to use the material as the basis of a documentary. Riefenstahl, comprising countless elements of the archive, along with documents from other sources, builds a biography of a person who never came clean about what she knew about Nazi Germany, and never took responsibility for her part in it. It's a complex and layered examination of a life led between pride and denial, and has resonances today: take Riefenstahl's television appearance in 1976 alongside Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti

A wide-ranging discussion follows the release of the final Mission: Impossible film... perhaps. José doesn't believe that they'll stop making them, nor does he want them to, but he is glad that Tom Cruise appears to be hanging up his boots - he's just too old now. While he reflects on Cruise's career and stardom, Mike's watched every Mission: Impossible film in anticipation of The Final Reckoning, and tracks changes in their aesthetics, sexuality, and comic tone, as the series worked its way towards finding the formula that's become its signature. Recorded on 27th May 2025.

The slasher series without a slasher returns for its sixth instalment, fourteen years after we last saw it. Where Halloween gave us Michael Myers, Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, Final Destination made death the villain - perhaps more accurately, Death, but we never see a cloaked man wielding a scythe. Where the figure of the slasher killer could, in principle, be evaded and even beaten, Final Destination's Death, non-corporeal and omnipresent, carries a key threat of inevitability. Nobody escapes Death. In each Final Destination film, one character's premonition of catastrophe gives them the chance to save themselves and others from death, but Death won't take being cheated lying down, and sets its sights on pursuing its near-victims to the graves they're currently avoiding. How? Through elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque accidents, of course. We discuss the ways in which Final Destination Bloodlines' set pieces work, how they focus on small moments and individual

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is a horror musical set in 1930s Mississippi, shot in part on IMAX 70mm film, starring Michael B. Jordan as a pair of identical twins who return to their hometown for a new start, only to encounter vampires. It's as ambitious as that sounds and full of ideas and culturally specific nuance, and José loves it. Mike doesn't. We discuss how the music draws on several influences, not just from the blues of the era but also from Irish folk and hip-hop; the getting-the-band-back-together feel of the opening, in which the twins bring their influence and riches to bear on the creation of the juke joint; the visual design, simultaneously confident and careless; the crowd-pleasing fantasy of an anti-racist Rambo; and the theme of vampirism - what it means and how it's used. Recorded on 5th May 2025.

What a joy! We were delighted to be invited to the University of Warwick Film and Television Studies department for a conversation with James MacDowell about Eavesdropping at the Movies: how it began, why we do it, what we get out of it, how we make it. We hope you enjoy what was an enormously satisfying hour and a bit in which we had the privilege to discuss our practice of film criticism with an audience keen to ask questions. Thank you to James for chairing and to Julie Lobalzo Wright for inviting us. Recorded on 29th April 2025.

Over the last couple of months, Chinese children's fantasy Ne Zha 2 has quickly, and arguably quietly, become the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, and the first animated film to gross over $2 billion. It's hard to keep up with the records it's been breaking - but can we keep up with the plot? No is the answer, but we readily accept that younger minds, and minds more in tune with Ne Zha 2's cultural context and mythological basis, won't feel as overwhelmed as we did. It did make us feel old, but this audiovisual whirlwind is beautiful and coherent - writer-director Jiaozi exhibits great control over the most energetic of action scenes, and has an eye for striking, colourful imagery. We discuss how closely some of the film's visual design and messaging might reflect the particular culture from which it comes, or whether it's so different from American cinema after all, and ask why this and last year's Inside Out 2 have been able to make so much money (the Pixar film grossing $1.7 billion and becoming t

After a little time off, we're back at the cinema to see Bong Joon Ho's sci-fi comedy, Mickey 17, in which Robert Pattinson dies. Repeatedly. Leaving Earth on a spaceship seeking to colonise an icy planet, Pattinson's Mickey is an "Expendable": a disposable worker given lethal assignments, regenerated by a biological printer, and sent out to die again. But when the 17th version of Mickey fails to die at the mandibles of the local fauna, he finds his way back to the colony, only to find that he's already been reprinted as Mickey 18 - and clone coexistence is strictly prohibited. We're disappointed by what looked like a marvellously energetic, knockabout comedy and social satire from the trailer. Even considering the film's very broad tone, there's too little in the characterisation to really buy in to, a severe lack of pace, and an ending that betrays it. Nonetheless, as failures go, it's an interesting one, playing with plenty of ideas, and featuring more than enough good jokes to support it. Our recommendat

We visit BFI Southbank for a 70mm screening of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's epic period drama. It's a super-sized film - 215 minutes, not including the intermission - and it deserves a super-sized podcast, for which we're joined, as we occasionally are, by Mike's brother, Stephen, who's already seen the film once. It's an extraordinarily complex, subtle and absorbing film that draws on countless themes and parts of history in telling its story of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect who escapes to America and finds a wealthy client enamoured with him. We dig in to the film's themes with breathless enthusiasm, and talk sex, racism, the immigrant experience, long takes, rape, capitalism, doing things for effect, art, aspiration, jealousy, the value of 70mm, and much more. José describes The Brutalist as his film of the year; Mike ponders whether he likes it more than the Robbie Williams monkey movie. Recorded on 28th January 2025.

"Steven Soderbergh's making a horror film from the perspective of the ghost" turns out to be a sentence specifically designed to appeal to Mike, who has been looking forward to Presence for ages. (José struggles to remember the film's title, even moments after having seen it.) But part of that pitch is deeply misleading. Presence's trailers were loaded with quotes from overeager horror publications that praised the film's fear factor, which leads to a little confusion when the final product is revealed to be a family drama that, despite the ghost whose eyes we see everything through, isn't even trying to scare us. And that's great! We just didn't realise that's what we were in for. What Presence gives us is a compelling exercise in film form and storytelling that constantly maintains our interest and which we thoroughly enjoy, but which sadly disappoints us in a variety of ways - though only a few of which we agree on. What interests Mike about the film's camerawork and handling of its invisible, point-of-vi

Nicole Kidman gives a compelling, vulnerable performance in Babygirl, as a woman for whom sexual satisfaction requires her to relinquish the power she otherwise projects throughout her life, and who begins an affair with a much younger man she finds herself unable to resist. Unfortunately, that's the only significant thing to recommend about the film, which we find superficial, badly thought out, and most crucially of all for Mike, nowhere near steamy enough. It's good fun to discuss, though, and gives us opportunity to reminisce about sneaking into films we weren't allowed to see when we were kids. Stick around to learn José's Looney Tunes technique for fooling the ticket guy. Recorded on 23rd January 2025.

The third film in Pablo Larraín's trilogy of iconic women, following 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer, Maria shows us the final week of the life of opera singer Maria Callas, who at the age of 53 is experiencing delusions, hallucinations, and the fear that her once-perfect singing voice has abandoned her. Mike isn't familiar with Maria Callas; José is (despite worrying before we started recording that he wouldn't have much to say when expected to explain who she is). No familiarity with her is required, however, to enjoy the film. Larraín's elegant direction, Steven Knight's intelligent screenplay, and Angelina Jolie's extraordinary, subtle performance combine beautifully to explore Maria's ego, fears, and passion. Maria's delusions, in which choirs fill town squares, orchestras back her in her apartment, and a fascinated journalist follows her around Paris chronicling her memories, are evident throughout the film... everywhere but in song. She knows all too well that her voice is leaving her, she hopes for

Writer-director Robert Eggers, whose reputation for aesthetically rich, deeply-researched and idiosyncratic horror precedes him, has long been working on a remake of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, the 1922 German Expressionist classic whose influence has been felt in the horror genre for a century. It's a big fish to try to take down, but it's source material that feels like it exists especially for him - how does he do? Very well, as it turns out... although, in classic fashion, we manage to talk around what a fantastic time we had by concentrating on our criticisms. Ignore them until you've taken yourself to the biggest cinema you can to see it - it's an experience you should have. Then come back and listen to us discuss the debt Eggers' Nosferatu owes to the colour tinting processes of the silent era, how the second half gets bogged down in tropes and plot, the delineation between sex and love, the pressure to be accessible, whether horror needs to be scary, and the important lesson we learned from Shrek Forev

You wait for ages for a film about a group of people sequestered in a room, questioning each other, keeping secrets, and repeatedly voting, and two come along at once. But while Juror #2's protagonist wrestled with his conscience, Conclave's Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, has little trouble consistently acting out of principle - sadly, many of his colleagues vying for the Catholic Church's vacant papacy don't share his clarity. Conclave is a marvellously entertaining mystery and thriller, a chamber play in which Fiennes' performance is a complex and deeply felt standout amongst a number of engaging, if less rich, star turns from Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini. We discuss whether the film is an advert for the Church, how it engages with religion, the striking visual design, liberalism vs. conservatism, representations of gender and nationality... and that magnificent twist. Spoilers within! Recorded on 1st December 2024.