Required Watching

Baz Luhrmann has made six feature films. Every single one is about the same thing — a person of extraordinary natural talent trapped inside a world that wants to commodify and contain that talent, expressed through maximalist visual language and music as emotional truth. EPiC, his first documentary, is the purest version of that argument he's ever made — because this time the subject is real, the footage is found, and t...

Ten days. Ten episodes. This is the one where everything lands. Kokuho is a fictional film about a kabuki performer that tells the truth about what becoming an artist costs. EPiC is a documentary that refuses to be a documentary and presents Elvis at the peak of his powers with no mediation. The 2022 Elvis biopic has Austin Butler giving a career-defining performance inside a form that couldn't contain what it was trying to say. Th...

In October 2025, I was alone in Hiroshima. I wandered into a kabuki theater not knowing what kabuki was, and watched a performance of Princess Takiyasha. I didn't speak the language well enough to follow the dialogue. I followed every second of it anyway. Months later I watched Kokuho — Lee Sang-il's three-hour epic about kabuki's bloodline system, the outsider who transcends it, and what it costs — and something clicke...

Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the film most Western audiences still haven't fully understood: the political satire hiding inside the procedural, the tonal architectu...

Yesterday's episode made the case that Western TV pilots lie — that they're persuasion documents built for commissioners rather than honest first chapters built for audiences. Today is the answer. J-drama structures its first episode like a complete short film — establishing emotional register before plot, tone before event, the specific texture of who these people are before anything happens to them. This episode expla...

The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series behind them. This episode makes the structural case for why the pilot format is lying to you, which pilots told the truth, and...

Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018. The reviews were glowing. The words "found family" and "poverty" appeared in almost all of them. And most of them described a film that is significantly less interesting than the one Kore-eda actually made. This episode makes the case that Western criticism landed on the warmth and missed the argument — and that the argument, which is cold and specific and directed at the Japa...

The British film industry produces diversity reports. It has standards, targets, tick-box initiatives, and annual announcements about progress. And the structural situation for Black filmmakers — in development, in commissioning, in creative control — has barely moved. This episode isn't another recitation of the numbers. It's about what the numbers can't capture: the specific texture of how exclusion works in a system ...

Somewhere in the British TV development process, the logline became the product. Not the story. Not the characters. The pitch. The elevator concept that sounds clean in a commissioning meeting and then struggles to hold together past episode two. This episode makes the case that British TV has built a development culture that selects for ideas that are easy to explain — and what that's costing us in the actual television bein...

Summary

In this episode,we discuss the profound impact of Disney's 1992 film Aladdin on the animation industry and its cultural significance. He highlights how Aladdin redefined Disney's approach to animated musicals through innovative storytelling, memorable music, and the introduction of a relatable protagonist. The film's humor, particularly through Robin Williams' iconic performance as the Genie, attracted a broader audience...

 You're tired of actors you actually like. That's not an accident — it's a business model. Hollywood is treating talent as intellectual property and audiences as brand targets, casting for TikTok engagement rather than craft. This episode breaks down the human IP factory, why it's going to collapse, and what Song Kang-ho and Paul Mescal's careers tell us about what's actually worth watching.

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A personal re-watch of The Lion King — this time with a kid and a writer's eye — surfaces something hiding in plain sight. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" is Simba telling the audience exactly what he wants and the film giving it to him in the cruelest possible way. A breakdown of protagonist desire, emotional craft, and why this film hits differently as a parent.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic lit...

 A 67-minute German silent film from 1920 is the foundation of modern horror, film noir, and psychological cinema. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari invented the unreliable narrator, the expressionist frame as psychological state, and the authoritarian villain. Here's why it still matters.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper story...

Hollywood abandoned the mid-budget everything-film. Chennai Express — Shah Rukh Khan, Rohit Shetty, every genre at once — proves Bollywood never did. A breakdown of why this specific kind of film is so hard to make well, and what it teaches about craft.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.

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Twisters has some of the best storm sequences in recent cinema. It also abandons Daisy Edgar-Jones, pivots to a rom-com, and loses the thread entirely in the second half. Quick reaction on what went wrong, and why a film this well-made managed to underdeliver.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.

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 Kevin Hart made a show about Kevin Hart wanting to be an action star — except he already is one. Die Hart is fun, disposable, and accidentally fascinating. This episode is a short rant that becomes a bigger question: what happens when enormous talent picks small bets?

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.

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A film from the London Film Festival about a disabled couple who want to get married — and can't, because the UK benefits system punishes them for it. Patrice: The Movie is playful, warm, and devastating. And it exposes a privilege most of us have never thought to question.

Required Watching is your curriculum for cinematic literacy. We deconstruct the art and craft of filmmaking to help you become a sharper storyteller.

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What happens when a film about conversion therapy is so aggressively colour-coded that the production design becomes the argument? In this episode, we break down But I’m a Cheerleader — Jamie Babbitt’s 1999 queer camp classic that weaponises pink, pastel, and Natasha Lyonne against the logic of forced identity correction.

We talk about camp as a protest language (not just an aesthetic), why Megan’s arc is...