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It's actually pretty good. Ralph is on strike. 

Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze is the subject of this week’s episode. His folk pastoral The Wishing Tree, with its blend of slapstick and sacrifice, enchants the boys in unequal measure, but they also dig up his Soviet satire Repentance for (partial) inspection. By the halfway mark, zapped of zeal after a year of lockdown film-watching, the boys digress into grassier pastures.

Who's the daddy? Between the young, flighty romance of À Nos Amours and the earnest soul-searching of Under the Sun of Satan Maurice Pialat carved out a brusque editing style - balanced by tender naturalistic performances. Writer Paige Murphy joins the boys to unpack Pialat's contradictions, spiritually, sexually and cinematically.

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror”. These lines are uttered, by Jean-Luc Godard himself, in 1983’s Prenom Carmen. Wild of hair, cigar to his lips. A Delphic oracle treading a tightrope between madness and cinema. In the years between 1983 and 1993, Godard turned his camera away from the screeching confections of his revolutionary period, and began to ask bigger and more transcendent questions. Like God. Like the relationship of man and woman. Like love (be it blue-balled or consummated). Languid, soft, graceful. On the surface, these films - Prénom Carmen (1983), Hail Mary/Je vous salue, Marie (1985), and Hélas pour Moi (1993) - look more like film-films; proper ‘arthouse’ stuff. And people have a tendency to disregard them because of this. Hitting middle age, what was Godard really aiming at? And does this period of his prolific filmmaking career still carry the banner of his earliest and most well remembered films? Naturally, Owen and Ralph take up the task of finding out.

Insider? Outsider? Shakeitallaboutsider? Robert Altman’s career was prolific and paradoxical, but what makes his films so memorable? Perhaps it’s the cat food in The Long Goodbye, or the all-yellow motel in 3 Women, maybe it’s Elliot Gould stuffing his shoes with banknotes at the end of California Split, or the off-kilter interrogation scene in The Player? Joining Owen and Ralph this week is actress Blu Hunt, who shares her own Altman journey and helps us diagnose Hollywood’s Discourse disease.

Who’s afraid of structural film? Not special guests Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Daniel Neofetou, who join the boys this week to discuss the adventurous career of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. What is a film when the film is concentrated, elongated, and entirely the sum of its parts? They look at Wavelength (1967), La Region Centrale (1971), "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), and  Cityscape (2019), among others, with a digression via music, composition, and the films of Brakhage and Hollis Frampton.

Out of the ashes of Mai '68 rises a very irritating phoenix, the didactic docu-diatribes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and their comrades at the Dziga Vertov Group, who take the collective blame for British Sounds (1969), Wind from the East (1970) and Tout Va Bien (1972). Ralph and Owen pore over the methodology behind the madness, wondering whether a cinema of displeasure can ever liberate an alienated people. Two wrongs don't make a left, guys.

Since his debut in 1980, Pedro Almodovar has become Spain's most cherished auteur. Trashy and transgressive in his trademark Technicolor, Almodovar's cinema of darkly comedic and twisted telenovelas has sensually probed the darker corners of Spanish modernity. Passion, sexuality, drugs, and insanity. His is a world of melodramatic matadors, diffident directors, pouting pimps, and star-crossed lovers, all of whom are searching for something special - and they'll do anything to get it. This is intricate and complex stuff. But striding into the ring to help us grapple with Almodovar are Lucy Bull and Matt Copson. Together, we run a sword through Matador (1986). Law of Desire (1987), and Tie me Up, Tie me Down (1989).

Part 1 of 3: Owen and Ralph delve deep into Jean-Luc Godard’s energetic first decade, a treasure trove or cinephilia, aesthetic innovation and frustrated romance. From the frisson of Breathless to the acid satire of Weekend the boys explore how the Cahier critic became France’s most accomplished auteur. And this is only the start…

Full list of films covered:

A bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie, Le Mépris, Band a part, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Week-end

Part of a three-part retrospective on Godard's career.

Birth, sex, marriage, death. The movement of the stars and the planets, the chopping down of a tree. For Stan Brakhage, the prolific high priest of American experimental cinema, the entirety of existence was under the lens - something both beautiful and mortally terrifying. This week, the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou to dissect some of Brakhage's most essential works: Anticipation of the Night (1958), Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Mothlight (1963), and Dog Star Man (1961-1964), among many, many others, charting his development from lyrical cinema and toward the so-called 'mythopoeic' style that came to dominate the painterly expressionism of his later films (such as The Dante Quartet, 1987). It's hard, hairy, and long, but really, really worth it.