Eavesdropping at the Movies

By Jose Arroyo and Michael GlassTV & Film

Eavesdropping at the Movies episodes

November 01 486 - Fatherland
The third film in Paweł Pawlikowski's historical trilogy, after Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), Fatherland follows one of the defining authors of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann, as he returns to Germany in 1949 with his daughter, Erika, after sixteen years away, finding his country effectively under occupation by the two new superpowers: the USA controlling the west, the Soviet Union controlling the east. The Manns encounter former Nazis (and continuing Nazi ideologues) forming the new polite society on one side, enthusiastic adherents to Communism and an alternative type of totalitarianism on the other, all while dealing with an intensely personal tragedy - the suicide of their son and brother, Klaus.
Pawlikowski's direction is austere, delicate and engrossing, and the film both benefits and suffers from its economical storytelling. Aspects of the characters and societies that are just barely dramatised with hints and ellipses might be better approached head-on, particularly the sexualities of some characters (Erika and Klaus were both gay, Klaus openly so, but the film builds in ambiguity to that, arguably doing their characters a disservice in the process); on the other hand, we're given room to interpret what we're shown, and the film's stylistic simplicity and brevity is a pleasure.
Fatherland is an interesting, intelligent and moving film, and, as José says, a fitting companion to Ida and Cold War: at least their equal, perhaps their superior. We recommend it.
Recorded on 26th October 2026.
32 min
October 29 487 - Clayface
Recorded on 27th October 2026.
28 min
October 23 485 - Verity
We love a good thriller, and Verity is one... depending on your expectations. It's reliant on three excellent star performances, Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett all charismatic and committed to getting the best out of the entertainingly daft screenplay. Verity does tricks on the tightrope between sincere and self-knowingly nonsensical, and is dramatic and funny in equal measure.
On top of this, we discuss the nuance - such as there can be, in the context of a somewhat absurd thriller - of the characters' actions, how the opening sets a tone that might be easy to overlook, and the layers of irony and uncertainty built in to the themes of truth and villainy. And we consider some depressing aspects of the real world that the film reflects, including the general societal illiteracy and stupidity it unwittingly reproduces in its dialogue and the novelistic and journalistic writing we're shown, the new media environment in which the podcast interview has become at least as important as legacy media, and the sizeable and vocal section of society that's devoted to demonising women as manipulative, psychopathic, murderous liars.
Recorded on 21st October 2026.
35 min
October 16 484 - Digger
Tom Cruise is great fun to watch as a boisterous Texan oil magnate in Digger, an ambitious satire from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It's a risky film, which we respect, and easy to enjoy. It's also a little too in love with its own conceit (a conceit kept from the trailers in order to spring a surprise on the audience, and which doesn't add a whole lot) and deeply unsubtle; arguably not too significant a problem for a film partially working in a register of farce, but still, we'd have liked to have felt a little more had been going on beneath the surface.
Recorded on 4th October 2026.
43 min
October 13 483 - It's My Time
Birmingham's Mockingbird Cinema hosted the European premiere of Chinese comedy-drama It's My Time, about a troublemaking old lady who enters the world of speedcubing - solving Rubik's cubes as quickly as possible. We remark upon the various ways it makes the competitions exciting, its range of themes and its ability to treat them with both levity and gravity, and the contradiction between its subtextual and explicit messages.
Recorded on 2nd October 2026.
31 min
September 03 482 - Coyote vs. Acme
In 2023, Warner Bros. announced the completion of Coyote vs. Acme, a family film in which Looney Tunes' Wile E. Coyote, still desperately and valiantly chasing the Road Runner, sues the Acme Corporation for selling defective products. They also announced that the film would not be released, preferring to claim a tax loss of some $30 million against it. Those who'd seen the film described how good it was and that it deserved a release, and there was opposition to its cancellation both publicly and within the industry. In response, Warner Bros. decided to shop it out to other distributors, with Ketchup Entertainment eventually buying and releasing it. Now that we've finally seen it, the question remains: was Coyote vs. Acme worth rescuing?
Recorded on 29th August 2026.
19 min
August 30 481 - Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinematic deconstructions. It tells the story of a young, queer, indie filmmaker hired to resurrect a problematic slasher series of yesteryear, the Camp Miasma films, which feature a box-headed villain who periodically emerges from a lake to murder teens who are drinking too much and forcing themselves on each other. Attempting to decide what she wants her reboot to be, she revisits the first film and meets its reclusive star, the enigmatic look in whose eye, in that first film, she's desperate to understand.
Mike gets on with Teenage Sex and Death; José does not. What José finds cutesy and aimless, Mike sees originality and charm in. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is keen to have their cake and eat it, building in criticism of Gen Z-esque reevaluations of old media by modern standards while engaging in them all the same. This is a film loaded with irony - but its love of its subject matter is obvious.
It's easy to argue that Teenage Sex and Death is at odds with itself when its former final girl (a delightfully drawling, glamorous Gillian Anderson) encourages the visiting filmmaker to cast off her intellectual pretensions and simply enjoy the "flesh and fluids", but it's a film that has plenty of room for ambiguity and blurring of the lines between points of view, and reality, media and fantasy. To some, the ambiguities will be approached as a problem to solve - just what is reality and what isn't, at the end of the day? - but for Mike, they're Schoenbrun's way of following Anderson's advice.
It's not a perfect film and there will be those to whom it fails to speak at all (one of them is on this podcast), but Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is at the very least interesting, and an eager addition to the groaning shelves of self-referential horror media.
Recorded on 23rd August 2026.
33 min
August 23 480 - Cabaret
Half a century since its 1972 release, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret remains startlingly sexy, funny and politically unsettling. We admire Liza Minnelli’s extraordinary star-making performance, the film’s distinctive choreography and cinematography, and how the Kit Kat Klub, and the numbers performed within, chart the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Berlin. We also consider its unusually liberated treatment of sexuality, and how its rejection of rigid binaries and hierarchies offers a counterpoint to the certainties of fascism.
Recorded on 16th August 2026.
49 min
August 18 479 - The End of Oak Street
The End of Oak Street puts Mike in mind of the sort of disposable but likeable films he watched on video as a child, although they didn't tend to cost $85 million to make. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell conspicuously apes Steven Spielberg with a family, a suburb, a dinosaur invasion, a large pile of poo and a lot of 1980s nostalgia. We debate whether the film’s derivativeness, charmless performances, ropey CGI and poor plotting are outweighed by its genuinely effective set-pieces and its success as uncomplicated monster-movie fun. The End of Oak Street is far from good but if you watch it on VHS when you're eight years old, just as Mike did with The Pagemaster and 3 Ninjas, it'll probably stay with you forever.
Recorded on 16th August 2026.
39 min
August 02 478 - Spider-Man: Brand New Day
We've tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021's No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to fighting street-level crime in New York City while pining for his old relationships and suffering severe headaches. Can he revive his former life? Surely it wouldn't be a Marvel film if an enormously significant, cliff-hanging event had permanent consequences.
Still, even for those as cynical as it's possible to be about the MCU, Brand New Day has plenty to recommend it. It aims for thematic depth - though how fully that's achieved is up for discussion - and is genuinely moving. Indeed, certain moments move the audience to cheer and applaud, which in turn moves Mike to harrumph bitterly. Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his second MCU entry following Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, demonstrates a gift for working with actors and a strong instinct for staging action, although Cineworld does its best to undermine those virtues with its poor projection.
We also return to our discussion of IMAX and The Odyssey, asking whether the frame's envelopment of the visual field impedes filmmakers' ability to express through composition and framing, and considering whether there's something fundamentally anti-democratic about making films whose fullest form can only be experienced at a handful of cinemas around the world.
Recorded on 1st August 2026.
45 min

About Eavesdropping at the Movies

From the publisher's feed

"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.