Return to Form

Happy Halloween, you delightful ghouls, and happy twenty-five episodes! This week, the boys fall under the hypnotic spell of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘j-horror’ masterpiece, Cure (Kyua). They also rank every single film they’ve reviewed so far, in an act of righteous folly.

Owen and Ralph are joined by Igor Toronyi-Lalic to discuss Éric Rohmer’s charming yet incisive cycle of ‘Comedies and Proverbs’, specifically The Aviator's Wife, Pauline at the Beach and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.  Behind these picture postcards lie questions of fate, desire and some serious object-oriented observation.

Mad, ‘bad’ and uncomfortable to watch, Michael Haneke’s films have often plumbed the very depths of what it means to be human in a time of crisis. In 2003’s minimalist apocalyptic chamber piece The Time of the Wolf, the boys find themselves torn: should cinema console us? Or should it lay our souls bare? Timely stuff indeed!

Does length matter? This week Owen and Ralph go for film tapas, sampling the smaller dishes currently warm on the MUBI buffet, including some very recent works made during the Covid-19 lockdown. In this order they discuss:

Wind by Marcell Iványi

In My Room by Mati Diop

End of Summer by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Strasbourg 1518 by Jonathan Glazer

Seven Years In May by Affonso Uchoa

Sexy, deranged, and a little bit, er, romantic. This week, the boys go eyeballs deep into Tinto Brass’s 1976 Nazispolitation soft core extravaganza, Salon Kitty. Does something serious stir beneath the covers, or was it just a limp attempt to shock us into submission?

Welcome to Calcutta, or is it Versailles? The boys wade into Marguerite Duras’ woozy chamber play - oozing with promiscuity and desperation - and ask that crucial existential question, are we nearly there yet?

Colonel Kurtz, I presume? This week, the boys deploy to Vietnam for Francis Ford Coppola’s psychedelic exegesis on violence, horror and despair. Is it more myth than movie - and how does war make monsters of us all?

Ever get the feeling you're in the wrong city, or maybe just the wrong genre? A bubbly Parisian dancer (Juliette Binoche) swaps apartments with an uptight Manhattan shrink (William Hurt) while a brooding arthouse auteur (Chantal Akerman) tries her hand at directing a fluffy screwball rom-com. What's the worst that could happen? To make sense of this 'perfect failure' the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou.

'How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?' So goes the famous tagline to Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's wildly controversial novel of 1955. This week, the boys met IRL to ask why Adrian Lyne bothered to do it again in 1997, taking a madcap detour via the motorways of the male gaze.

What's love got to do with it? Pedro Almodovar's chilling drama about two comatose women and the men who watch over them gets Owen and Ralph animated about desire, trauma and yes, repressed heterosexuality.