Far from an outstanding film, but amazing to look at and too much fun not to recommend, we had a great time in Tron: Ares, which reverses the reality-computer interface that brought humans into the digital world in the previous two films; it's now the virtual that becomes real. An evil company searches for the code that will give its 3D printed computer assets longevity in the real world - so far, they crumble into dust after about twenty minutes - but the AI tasked with doing so goes rogue, hoping to use the code to bring itself to life. It's Pinocchio and Frankenstein with neon-oozing motorbikes, and as entertaining as that sounds. (We think that sounds entertaining.)

Recorded on 12th October 2025.

We're joined by our resident Paul Thomas Anderson expert (and Mike's brother), Stephen Glass, to whom we've previously spoken about Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, for another discussion of One Battle After Another. Stephen's seen it in both VistaVision and IMAX 70mm, and can offer a sense of the experience Mike and José missed seeing it in IMAX Digital, and so begins a wide-ranging conversation about the film's aesthetics, tone, politics, influences and more.

Recorded on 5th October 2025.

Mike isn't impressed with The Rock's attempt to take on a dramatic role in an intimate biopic after decades of popcorn blockbusters, seeing it as Oscar bait. José doesn't share his cynicism and likes the lead performance. We discuss what The Smashing Machine depicts - disagreeing, in particular, about whether the protagonist shares any blame for the issues in his relationship - as well as whether its look and storytelling are problems, and just how shoddy things are getting at Cineworld. Yet we keep going back.

Recorded on 5th October 2025.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, directed by former video essayist Kogonada, is beautiful to look at and very likeable, but derivative and ultimately unsatisfying. We discuss its lighting, its attitude towards people's histories and the memories that live with them, and why a rubbish script Mike once wrote makes him particularly keen to sneer at it.

Recorded on 29th September 2025.

Cheap, simple, high-concept and reasonably graphic, The Long Walk is a throwback to the days of the B-movie. In its dystopian, totalitarian version of the USA, an annual event, the Long Walk, is designed to inspire a work ethic and national pride in the citizenry, and in so doing restore the country to that self-defined global number one status it craves; to make America great again. The televised competition sets fifty young men, one from each state, against each other in a test of endurance: they must walk for as long as they can, maintaining a speed of over 3mph at all times, with success rewarded with unimaginable riches and the fulfilment of a personal wish, and repeated failure to keep up punished with on-the-spot execution. There is one winner.

What promises to be quite dumb is not quite as dumb as Mike anticipates. The worldbuilding is fairly thin, and the premise of the competition an immediate hurdle for the audience to clear, but The Long Walk is able to develop thematically in surprising depth through the interactions and conversations between its competitors, who share their thoughts on the event, the personal histories that draw them to it, and their intentions if they win. With a number of reservations - we find its visual direction lacking and differ on how good the performances and screenplay are - it's easy to recommend The Long Walk, which shows us an America in need of revolution, and asks its characters what it might take to achieve it.

Recorded on 28th September 2025.

By far Paul Thomas Anderson's most expensive film, with a budget some four or five times what he's used to, and probably his most accessible, One Battle After Another entertains us enormously and effortlessly without sacrificing the complexity and nuance for which his work is known. Set in an alternate America oppressed by Christofascism, the alternate part is that there's a very active militant revolutionary group, the French 75, setting bombs off and freeing detained minorities. Leonardo DiCaprio is part of it, and sixteen years after the conclusion of his group's activities, their work has entered countercultural legend, but he's become a drug-addicted, paranoid burnout, trying to raise a teenage daughter. When the powers that be come looking for them, they're separated, all hell breaks loose, and he has to step up.

José finds One Battle After Another to be the film of the moment, the state of the nation film that Eddington could only dream of being, a powerful, invigorating expression of what ails America and what it means to resist. Mike is more cynical, seeing an element of mockery in the revolution that has no apparent intention to end and is carried out over generations. We love the easygoing style of filmmaking that Anderson seems to have grown into, comparing it to the rigid formality of his early work, and finding that he has a talent for action cinema that's never quite come out before. We also discuss the film's themes of youth and ageing, parenting, the Christian right and more.

One Battle After Another is an unmissable film, the kind that fifty years ago would have defined America's national conversation. Cinema no longer holds that level of cultural cachet, sadly, but One Battle After Another is a powerful, energetic, and very funny reminder of what film can do at its best.

Recorded on 28th September 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.

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.

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.

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.