Eavesdropping at the Movies

Eavesdropping at the Movies

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo. "I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.

Episodes

June 11, 2025 39 mins
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 it...
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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 aesthe...
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May 22, 2025 34 mins
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 beat...
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May 13, 2025 41 mins
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 ...
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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. Th...
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March 25, 2025 33 mins
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...
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March 23, 2025 39 mins
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 f...
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January 28, 2025 114 mins
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 tell...
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January 25, 2025 24 mins
"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 fact...
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January 24, 2025 41 mins
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,...
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January 22, 2025 56 mins
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 w...
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January 6, 2025 54 mins
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 ...
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December 4, 2024 34 mins
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...
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December 1, 2024 32 mins
A film whose brilliant conceit is so simple and compelling we can't believe we've never seen it before, Juror #2 tells the story of a juror whose responsibility it is to assess the guilt of a defendant who he knows is innocent of murder - because it was the juror who did it. Summoned to serve on a jury and quickly recognising the details of the case, Nicholas Hoult's Justin realises that the deer he hit with his car one dark, stor...
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November 27, 2024 35 mins
Hugh Grant brings his idiosyncratic brand of English charm to the world of horror in Heretic, in which he isolates and tests the faith of two young Mormon missionaries. It's a film that leaves you asking all sorts of questions, such as, "did anything he was up to actually make any sense?", but for a horror film so heavy on the dialogue and relatively light on the scares, it's fabulously enertaining throughout - a real achievement o...
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November 25, 2024 16 mins
We enjoyed the first. We didn't care for the second. Does the third bring back the fun? No, not really. Recorded on 17th November 2024.
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November 19, 2024 33 mins
Ridley Scott returns to Gladiator after more than twenty years, telling a story that's broadly the same, but neatly picks up from the original too. Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal in the central role, and we discuss whether he has the movie star charisma to match his indie film credentials; we also talk action, visual effects, Denzel Washington's Iago figure, the trope of the gay villain, and more. Recorded on 15th November 2024.
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October 9, 2024 35 mins
2019's Joker, which gave the iconic supervillain an all-purpose mental health disorder, a tragic origin story, and a name - Arthur Fleck - was never meant to have a sequel. But it made a billion dollars, so Joker: Folie à Deux is here. And, being a jukebox musical based primarily on show tunes from the mid-20th century canon, we ask who it's for. The first film took risks in eschewing so many trappings of the comic book genre; did ...
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October 2, 2024 43 mins
Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited passion project, Megalopolis, self-funded to the tune of $120m, has finally arrived. We love it. It's wild, imaginative, earnest, and beautiful. We discuss and decry some of the criticisms of it we've already seen while coming up with some of our own - how could we have known that an octogenarian might hold some rather traditional views? - in between breathlessly enthusing about what captivated u...
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August 27, 2024 52 mins
A welcome new instalment in the Alien franchise, which has moved between genres and directors, remained popular for over four decades, and offered fascinating expansions of its internal mythos, Alien: Romulus moves with the times to give Generation Z the opportunity to die in space. It goes like the clappers, orchestrates loads of entertaining, tactile action, and is unbelievably good-looking. It's also underwritten, arguably overs...
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