Episodes

  • 456 - Together

    456 - Together
    Sep 11 2025
    Commitment is scary. It's especially scary when you drink water from a cursed puddle that wants to make a hybrid of you and your partner. Together tells the story of a couple moving to a new countryside home during a questionable period in their relationship: she has a new job and is responsible for the move away; he's emotionally distant since the death of his parents and relies on her for transportation and financial security. They love each other, but will they last? First-time director Michael Shanks demonstrates a good instinct for tone, effectively combining comedy and horror - that Alison Brie and Dave Franco (married in real life) are both experienced comic actors helps the film draw out the absurdity of the events it depicts. What quibbles we might have with details of its supernatural basis are easily ignored because its focus always remains on the central couple. It doesn't matter that some specific detail might not be explained to our satisfaction: the question is always, how do the couple respond to their predicament? Together never loses sight of what's most important, and that makes it one of the best horrors - maybe one of the best films full stop - that we've seen in a while. Recorded on 24th August 2025.
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    28 mins
  • 455 - Eddington

    455 - Eddington
    Sep 8 2025
    Most film and TV has quietly agreed to pretend that the Covid pandemic never happened. Perhaps it's too awkward to discuss it. Perhaps it'll date your work. Writer-director Ari Aster doesn't share these worries, telling a story about the days of lockdowns, mask mandates and conspiracy theories - days of particular hostility and division in the USA, in which individual freedom does constant battle with the greater good. Eddington is an ambitious attempt at the state-of-the-nation film: a darkly comic thriller with wild tonal shifts, a mass of interwoven themes, uneven pacing, and an eventual climb out of reality into absurdity. José finds much to dislike, particularly its dismissive attitude towards the young people it depicts supporting the Black Lives Matter movement; Mike is surprised at how much he likes it, given how let down he felt by Hereditary. Eddington is certainly a mixed bag, but we're glad to have seen it. Recorded on 24th August 2025.
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    33 mins
  • 454 - Weapons

    454 - Weapons
    Sep 5 2025
    One of the most hotly-anticipated horror films in recent memory, Weapons begins with seventeen third-grade children in a Pennsylvania town mysteriously waking up at 2:17am one Wednesday and running from their homes into the darkness. The shocking, unexplained disappearance and imagery of an empty classroom alone suggest an allegory of school shootings, and we ask what else can be read into the film, and discuss the depth with which it handles its themes. We have our issues with Weapons but enjoy it very much all the same, and find a lot to like. It's probably just a little overpraised. Two weeks later, with the film still on his mind, Mike opens up further discussion and proposes that maybe there's more to it than he gave it credit for - or that you have to be American to properly get it. Recorded on 10th and 24th August 2025.
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    48 mins
  • 453 - The Shrouds

    453 - The Shrouds
    Sep 1 2025
    A psychosexual thriller that's neither psychosexual nor thrilling enough, The Shrouds is a disappointment. There's great promise to businessman Vincent Cassel's invention of a technologically advanced shroud that creates a 3D model of the decaying body it houses, when we're shown the lust with which he observes his deceased wife's corpse. The film is peppered with recurrent imagery of her disfigured body, and its importance to Cassel's character is constantly reinforced, but the film is too talky, its imagery too bland, and its plot too convoluted to make the most of it. A shame. Recorded on 6th August 2025.
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    26 mins
  • 452 - The Ballad of Wallis Island

    452 - The Ballad of Wallis Island
    Aug 26 2025
    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.
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    31 mins
  • 451 - Friendship

    451 - Friendship
    Aug 22 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.
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    33 mins
  • 450 - The Naked Gun (2025)

    450 - The Naked Gun (2025)
    Aug 13 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.
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    30 mins
  • 449 - Bring Her Back

    449 - Bring Her Back
    Aug 2 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.
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    34 mins