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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 449 – Bring Her Back

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…

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THINKING ALOUD ABOUT CINEMA: CINEMA REDISCOVERED 2025 WRAP-UP

If a week ago we podcast on what we were looking forward to at the CINEMA REDISCOVERED festival, this is the bookend reflecting on what we actually saw. We are once again full of praise for the organisers, the friendliness of the staff at the Watershed, the originality and diversity of the programme, the community aspect, the educational component and the way that it trains young people up to…

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 448 – Jurassic World Rebirth

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…

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 447 – Superman (2025)

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…

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José Arroyo In Conversation with Sam Shahid, director of HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES

George Platt Lynes is arguably the most significant artist in a long and distinguished line of great 20th Century queer photographers of the male nude which includes George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, Clifford Coffin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. All in some sense worked in the interstices of fashion, portraiture, art photography and the nude. Yet, though Platt Lynes is at least…

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 446 – F1

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…

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José Arroyo in Conversation with Daniel Bird on THE FALL OF OTRAR (Ardak Amirkulov, 1991)

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Incompresso (Luigi Comencini, 1966).

A beautiful film about childhood, quite restrained in its telling but very successful as a tearjerker. The film begins with the British Consul in Florence (Anthony Quayle) at his wife’s deathbed deciding how he’s going to tell the news to his children. He decides on telling the oldest, Andrew, who he feels can handle it, but not the youngest, Miles, who is not yet in school and, in his view, more…

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THE SUNDAY WOMAN/ La donna della Domenica (Luigi Comencini, 1975)

A mystery with a comical bent set in Turin’s high society based on a best-selling novel by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. A man is killed with a giant dildo. Inspector Santamaria (Marcello Mastrioanni), polite, middle-aged, Roman, with a structured life which includes having sex on Sundays with women he doesn’t care to have stay until Monday, is the detective. Jacqueline Bisset, at the peak…

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THE IRON PREFECT/ IL PREFETTO DI FERRO (PASQUALE SQUITIERI, 1977)

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Thinking Aloud About Film: Cinema Rediscovered 2025 Preview

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A MAN ON HIS KNEES / UN UOMO IN GINOCCHIO (Damiano Damiani, 1979).

Like a Warners 30s Gangster Film. Giuliano Gemma is former car thief now gone straight. He’s out of jail, running a street stall and doing well for his family, when a place he delivers coffee to becomes the site of a mafia hit. A coffee cup carelessly left there implicates him and puts him on a mafia hit list. The film is all about how society dictates a man should be and the impossibility of…

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Thinking Aloud About Film: DELITTO D’AMORE (Luigi Comencini, 1974).

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Thinking Aloud About Film: Ritrovato Round-Up 2025 with Pamela Hutchinson

For this year’s Ritrovato Round-Up we are joined by the witty, incisive and all-around fabulous Pamela Hutchinson, editor of the Silent London website, author of two marvellous BFI Classic monographs (The Red Shoes, Pandora’s Box), producer of the Weekly Film Bulletin for Sight and Sound and one of the jurors for Ritrovato’s DVD Awards since 1918. In the discussion that follows we touch on all…

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Thinking Aloud About Film: Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

A cult film; a queer film; a vampire film; a film maudit; a film about film; a film about drugs; a film about film as a drug;  a film that deserves to be better known. Audiences will recognise many of Almodóvar’s collaborators from his earliest works (Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, Luis Ciges, Will More; Ángel Luis Fernádez is the dop) and the voice of Almódovar himself. A genre film that…

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Eavesdropping at the Movies: 445 – Riefenstahl

n 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…

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Jose Arroyo in Conversation with James Taylor on ....THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING

Just as the Superhero film loses centrality in the culture there comes a book that is not only a brilliant accounting of the various strategies of adaptations the mode engages with but also offers a methodology that will be of interest and use to anyone engaged with the analysis of visual media:  not only a brilliant book, but an important one. In this podcast we talk about what it is that is…