The Cinematologists Podcast

Welcome friends.As always, our final episode of a calendar year is a look back at our cinematic highlights, structured around Neil’s and my top ten films lists. We always try to put this in something of a broader context, suggesting the always subjective criteria of judgement that go into our selections and the sense of incompleteness, compromise and general fallibility of ranking one’s artistic pleasure and admiration. But Neil is right when he comments on the show that lists are a way of organising thought amid the incessant noise of cultural overload.That question of structure becomes a recurring preoccupation across the conversation. Neil mentions that, when assembling his ten, he found himself instinctively pairing films; spotting “cousins” that echo each other in tone, narrative, or thematic focus.This is something of a recognition that cinematic appreciation often works through a clustering: films that don’t merely share “topics” (capitalism, community, violence, grief), but share strategies for coping with a world that increasingly refuses coherence.For me, an undeniable feature of 2025 in cinema has been the many narratives that reflect a feeling of senselessness—stories that don’t “resolve” so much as metabolise disorder. We keep circling filmmakers who can register the insanity of the present without converting it into a tidy thesis. Radu Jude is the obvious touchstone here: we talk about how his filmmaking avoids the temptation of big declarative statements, holding sincerity and cynicism, humour and despair, in the same hand.Kontinental 25, as much as any other film this year, explores the granular experience of politics as a kind of moral nausea, digital immediacy of its form aping the doom-scroll logic of being pulled from one sickening little story to the next.We keep returning to the sense that many “state of the nation” films this year (especially in the American context) operated as overt statements—almost insistently discursive—while, at the same time, we explored quieter, more contemplative works that approached personal and social crisis through subtler uses of form, tone, and time.Many films this year, implicitly and explicitly, explored the tensions of capitalism as a kind of lived texture: bureaucracy, managerialism, the violence of systems that call themselves neutral. From the handheld realism of Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine) right through to the expansive mythos and genre pleasures of Sinners (Ryan Coogler), the political economy of history and identity becomes a driving force.Indeed, Neil looks beyond the reductive “folk horror” label attached to Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, reading it instead as a study of collective life, of a community’s ethical capacity being tested by difference. Yet, in the end, capitalism arrives not as an abstract system but as an administrative colonisation that annihilates any sense of physical and cultural grounding.Political critique, meanwhile, was often built into formal aesthetics and narrative structure, delivered through inventive reworkings of familiar genres. Sinners, along with Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, were, of course, operating within the métier of horror. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk (the only film in my top ten I didn’t see at the cinema) is a brutal, unrelenting take on the speculative-dystopian trope of lethal competition, one that reads as a symbolic portrait of social psychopathy.Alongside these political currents sits another, quieter one: the insistence that time, how it’s felt, withheld, folded, or weaponised, might be cinema’s most underappreciated tool. Neil’s mini-rant about people calling Reichardt “slow” is really about the poverty of contemporary attention. The film knows it’s slow; it’s inviting you to spend time, to register the “felt time” of what happened before the film even begins. Elsewhere, we keep noticing films that structure revelation itself as an ethical question: when do we learn things, and how do we learn them?It’s why Nickel Boys becomes such a touchstone film for me, one that is criminally under-discussed. RaMell Ross’s attunement to memory and subjectivity, rather than objective historical biography, is realised through an innovative use of the POV shot—retooling it as an “aesthetics of alignment with empathy,” an apparatus through which we’re offered a multi-layered window into psycho-social trauma.I don’t want to reveal all the films we discuss—particularly our top choices—which, if you’ve followed The Cinematologists podcast, might strike you as paradoxically both as you might expect and somewhat contrary to expectations.At the end of the show, we spend a little time reflecting on The Cinematologists. We talk about the show’s ten-year run as a fitting “bracketing,” and hope it stands as a testament to a valuable, collaborative body of work. We discuss the different stages of the podcast, how it has evolved over time, and why, for various reasons in our work and personal lives, this feels like the right moment to stop.We’re no longer “young academics,” no longer driven by the same imperative to fill a gap in the culture. And we’ve always said that if the podcast ever became a chore—or, worse, if it looked like it might compromise our friendship—it would be time to draw things to a close.For me, I know I’ll reflect more in depth, in time, on what The Cinematologists has meant: the defining anchor of my cultural life, and a way of orienting my thoughts around the artform I love. I do need a little space, though, to adequately reckon with how much I’ve gained, the hard and soft skills that have made me a better writer, speaker, and thinker. Most importantly, producing the show with Neil for over a decade has taught me so much about the nature of collaboration, a commitment to practice, and what it means to be a friend.And, of course, thank you so much to everyone who has listened and come with us on this journey._____For the full Cinematologists archive, head to: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/the-cinematologists-newsletter-archiveFor more bonus content: www.patreon.com/cinematologists_____Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome, friends.I have to admit that I’ve experienced a questionable amount of pleasure in researching for this latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. When I say “research”, I basically mean that every evening for the past two weeks I’ve been guiltlessly revelling in the violence, glamour and moral ambiguity of the cinema’s greatest hitmen (and women), assassins, and lone killers.It’s the question of these pleasures - of watching such characters move silently through the modern milieu we share: restaurants, banks, hotels, airports - and of their status as avatars for the commodity fetishism we’re socialised to desire, whether it’s clothes, cars, exotic locations or, indeed, guns, that we take as the starting point.These pleasures are aesthetic, to be sure, and a core line of our conversation explores the visual and sonic mechanisms filmmakers use to make the lone killer look impossibly cool.But on a deeper level, there are myriad symbolic pleasures to unpack, primarily derived from the assassin’s fundamental essence as a professional arbiter of death. By “symbolic pleasures” I mean the fantasies we get to borrow and try on at a safe distance. Cinema has always trafficked in these kinds of projected desires and anxieties, that’s what genres, stars and archetypes are for. But the lone killer amplifies this function, condensing into a single figure our contradictory longing for total freedom and autonomy, yet within the familiar framework of modernist culture, politics, and economics.We outline the dimensions of these symbolic pleasures. Total agency without negotiation or compromise, for instance. The killer embodies absolute decision-making and self-determination. In a culture of soft coercions, bureaucracy, b******t meetings, and interminable incompetence, the killer taps into a dark form of detached liberation. Although this notion is itself confounded to comic effect in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly (2012).The lone killer also exudes the romance of the outsider. The shadowy loner, an anti-citizen manipulating the system from the margins, carries a sense of mystery that endures, particularly in a time when sharing every aspect of our lives has become something of a default performative practice. Indeed, it’s fascinating to consider the lone killer as a symbol of alienation. They’re what a certain kind of loneliness looks like when it becomes active rather than depressive: isolation turned into method, detachment honed into a way of being in the world.For some killers, sexual desire is absolutely central to the mythos. Bond is the clearest prototype here, because scholarship has long framed him as a figure where violence is packaged with aspirational consumption and sexual charisma, all intertwined. And then there’s the sexual charge, which often isn’t “romance” so much as mobility: sex as another form of non-attachment, a proof that the killer can pass through bodies and spaces without being pinned down by them. Yet Bond films (and to an extent the character himself) have been read through a queer lens – breaking down the heteromasculine fantasy the films seem to promote (an aspect we discuss in some depth on this episode of the podcast: License to Queer).The real hook, though, is the fantasy of having no responsibilities to other humans. Or, more accurately, the fantasy of choosing your responsibilities. These protagonists often keep one small “human” attachment in a sealed container while everyone else becomes abstraction: targets, obstacles, and collateral damage. That compartmentalisation is the emotional technology that allows the lifestyle to function.Sexuality reads differently, of course, when the lone killer is a woman. The adoption of the femme fatale persona becomes both a weapon and a trap: seduction as tactical performance, but also as a ready-made framework through which her violence is contained, coded and often punished. The female lone killer frequently has to navigate the double bind of being hyper-visible as an object of desire while trying to claim the same cool detachment and professional focus afforded to her male counterparts.Then there’s competence as seduction. So many of these films function as “craft porn”: extended sequences of planning, surveillance, weapon prep, logistics, timing. We’re invited to admire mastery long before we’re asked to consider the consequences. That emphasis on hyper-competence often feeds into another recurring strand of lone-killer characterisation: a kind of obsessive, compulsive pathology. There is frequently an implicit, and sometimes explicit, suggestion that the killer is an outsider not just because of what they do, but because of how they are wired – uncomfortable with ordinary social interaction, more at home with systems and routines than with people. Being “out of sync” with the social world is then reframed as the superpower that underwrites their cold precision and attention to detail. It’s a trope that, to put it mildly, comes with its own problems around how neurodivergence and emotional detachment are conflated and aestheticised.Perhaps most importantly of all, though, the hitman/assassin symbolises the pleasure of circumventing – even actively challenging – the contradictions of the moral frameworks we’re all supposedly compelled by. On one level, it’s straightforward: breaking the laws of modern society to “get the job done” is stylised into an art form. But for many of these characters, especially those who aren’t simply nihilistic or coldly driven by money, there’s also a kind of ersatz morality at play. They possess a code, an ethos that operates as a moral alibi. Their relativist ethics become a way to expose the contingency, compromise, and hypocrisy of our broader systems of justice and citizenship. In watching them, we get to flirt with the fantasy of stepping outside that contradiction altogether.dariollinares.substack.comwww.cinematologists.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

Gwenno, on the set of her short film, Tresor (2022) [Copyright: Bosena / Alex Fish]We have the perfect theme song for our podcast, courtesy of the musician, artist and writer Gwenno. In Bristol in September, for the Encounters film festival, Neil took some time to chat to Gwenno at length about culture, social media, memory, capitalism and community, to put on [tape] some shared thoughts about life and art, before the podcast winds down. Even before writing and recording the theme tune to the Cinematologists - available to purchase and stream here - Gwenno was a friend of the show, and Neil wanted to give listeners the chance to hear from someone whose ideas and approaches to the making and absorbing of art have come to inspire and challenge his own. He also just really likes talking to her, and wanted podcast listeners to experience that pleasure also. Around that central conversation, inspired by it, Neil and Dario get into it about intersections of art and culture as they frequently do, plus challenges faced by contemporary youth, the critical engagement of students with the film industry, the quest for artistic authenticity, and the evolving nature of countercultures in the digital age. The conversation also touches on the impact of technology on creativity, the role of education in fostering cultural exploration, and reflections on historical subcultures like rave culture. Thanks to Maddie at Watershed in Bristol for providing a space to record during the Encounters Film Festival. Gwenno is currently touring and if she’s near you, you should go and see her, she’s an incredible live performer. This episode also features her songs ‘Tresor’, from the album and film of the same name, from 2022, and available to buy here, and ‘St Ives New School’, from this year’s brilliant record Utopia, which you can buy here. ———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

It felt apt that Neil and I were both in London for this year’s edition of the festival. Over the years of The Cinematologists, we’ve covered a range of international events, always striving to capture not just our critical responses to the films, but something of the atmosphere, the resonance of the experience itself.Living in London, I usually don’t feel that full, immersive festival bubble. There’s always the pull of everyday life at the edges. By contrast, attending an international festival abroad brings with it a heightened sense of dislocation—a kind of lived difference that reanimates the senses. That estrangement, combined with the charged intensity of being inside a self-contained epicentre of cinematic energy, somehow deepens both the viewing experience and one’s critical focus.With Neil in town for what amounted to an extended long weekend, I resolved to pack as much into five intense days of screenings, conversations, and cinematic overload. Normally, I prefer to experience films alone, especially at festivals. The solitude seems to both sharpen my concentration in the watching itself. But after a decade of co-hosting The Cinematologists, Neil and I have developed an unspoken rhythm - an ease in conversation and, just as importantly, sit together in that post-screening quiet, letting the film settle before the dialogue begins.We recorded the episode after our final screening together—François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. It proved an apt conclusion: gorgeously shot, restrained yet expressive, and, to my mind, remarkably faithful to the source material. Neil and I found ourselves immediately drawn into questions of form and aesthetics—recurring preoccupations on the podcast in recent years. How, and why, do filmmakers adopt particular visual modes to explore aspects of the human condition? And, more provocatively, is there an ethical contradiction in rendering violence, trauma, crisis, or poverty with beauty?Across this year’s programme, that tension between sensuous visuality and political critique felt ever-present—a paradox that became the connective tissue of our conversations throughout the episode. Many of the films, often formally inventive and emotionally arresting, provoked questions about how cinema confronts and represents the cruel absurdities of contemporary experience, something I’ve been preoccupied with throughout this cinematic year.Ozon’s film, of course, approaches this quite literally, but for me, so many of the works we saw continued a broader trend: filmmakers striving to make sense of senselessness through audio-visual forms that both frame the social and implicate the viewer. Themes of displacement, memory, alienation, and the ethics of representation ran through much of our discussion, as did a shared sense that contemporary filmmakers are consciously reconfiguring documentary, fiction, and hybrid modes to articulate a pervasive cultural unease.We hope you enjoy the conversation, and as usual, we welcome any comments on the films or what we say about them.As always, thanks for coming back or clicking for the first time on Contrawise. If you’re here for the first time, I’m an errant academic, writing and speaking about cinema, media, and art with a philosophical approach.Films discussed on the episodeThe Stranger (dir. Francois Ozon)Ozon’s adaptation of Camus’ existential classic centres on Meursault, a detached and indifferent Frenchman in colonial Algeria who, weeks after his mother’s funeral, impulsively kills an unnamed Arab man on a sun-drenched beach. The subsequent trial becomes an inquiry not only into the murder but into the absurdist senselessness.Starring the excellent Benjamin Voisin, embodying the character’s apathy, alienation, and refusal to conform to moral expectations. Shot with Ozon’s characteristically meticulous visual control, the film is gorgeously rendered—its romantic luminosity almost at odds with the bleakness of the material. In our discussion, we consider whether this sumptuous aesthetic intensifies or undermines the sense of existential ennui that lies at the heart of Camus’ seminal text.Kontinental ‘25 (dir. Radu Jude)Perhaps the most compelling film of the festival for both of us, Kontinental 25 cements Jude’s position as one of the most innovative criticially astute filmmakers working today. Shot on an iPhone 15 in just nine days, we delve into its structure: long, single-take dialogues that blur the boundaries between satire, social critique, and observational realism. Jude’s commitment to implicating the viewer in contemporary dilemmas - homelessness, inequality, liberal guilt - is both brutal and hilarious. A masterclass in how form and ideology intertwine.The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)Neil’s solo review of Reichardt’s latest, featuring Josh O’Connor. We’ve always loved Reichardt on the podcast; an early live event focused on Old Joy (2006), and how her genre work and character studies are steeped in rich, observational minimalism. Neil explores how the film takes the heist genre and infuses it with her ongoing cinematic interests in economic precarity, disconnection, and quiet desperation.It continues a fascination with the work of O’Connor for Neil too, following him finally ‘getting’ the actor in his favourite 2024 release, Alice Rohrwacher’s sublime La Chimera. With The Mastermind, Neil particularly liked how Reichardt plays with genre twists, from classic heist mode to something more reflective in terms of a character’s odyssey of reckoning on the road. Definitely a favourite from the fest, and the year as a whole.It Was Just an Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, is a deceptively simple film that unfolds into the profound. Unlike his more overtly meta-cinematic works, this is a relatively linear narrative, yet it bears all of the Iranian auteur’s hallmarks: moral tension, black humour, and an acute sense of the everyday as political theatre.The story begins with a family driving through the Iranian countryside at night. A momentary lapse—a dog struck on a quiet road—sets in motion a chain of events that spiral into something far darker. When their car breaks down, they arrive at a remote garage run by a man named Vahid. Hearing the father’s prosthetic leg knock against the floorboards, Vahid becomes convinced he has found one of his former torturers from a prison camp where he was held blindfolded decades earlier. What follows is an unsettling, almost allegorical narrative of suspicion, revenge, and moral reckoning. Panahi transforms this familiar premise into a complex study of guilt, trauma, and retribution.Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin)Mark Jenkin’s third feature - produced in association with Neil’s Sound/Image Cinema Lab - continues his commitment to the tactile, handmade qualities of cinema while venturing into his most expansive and narratively ambitious work to date. On the surface, Rose of Nevada employs a familiar conceit: two young fishermen, played by Callum Turner and George MacKay, are sent aboard a trawler that mysteriously reappears after having been lost at sea for thirty years. Once they set sail, time begins to fold in on itself, and what follows is a haunting, non-sci-fi exploration of memory, loss, and the persistence of the past.Rose of Nevada is, quite simply, ravishing to look at. The colours - deep, saturated, defiantly un-digital - seem to breathe with the Cornish landscape and seascape. Abstract intercuts of bark, light, water, and surface give the film a kind of expressionist pulse; images shimmer between the material and the metaphysical.We discuss Jenkin’s characteristic approach to performance - “Bressonian deadpan” - where actors deliver lines with studied restraint, becoming cyphers for ideas and emotional undercurrents rather than expressive psychological portraits. The film feels like a confluence of Jenkin’s earlier work - Bait’s class-inflected regional politics and Enys Men’s metaphysical strangeness - now realised at a larger scale and with bolder artistic confidence. It recalls the material realism of Leviathan and even the mythic textures of Jaws, though entirely on Jenkin’s own terms.And, I share my “I went swimming with George MacKay” anecdote.My interview with Mark from earlier in 2025 when he had just finished editing the film.Also mentioned in the episodeSinging Wings (dir. Hemen Khaledi)Dry Leaf (dir. Alexandre Koberidze)The Son and The Sea (dir. Stroma Cairns)After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino)Becoming Human (dir. Polen Ly)Dreams (dir. Michel Frano)With Hassan in Gaza (dir. Kamal Aljafari)Palestine 36 (dir. Annemarie Jacir)You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

We are back! Season 22 kicks off with a stellar, loose, multi-layered, melancholic, heated and nervy, shambling odyssey of an episode, which befits the central discussion, centred as it is around the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.The timing of the release of the new PTA is fortuitous as he is a filmmaker that we have circled around over the years, given my love for the filmmaker, as well as his place in contemporary American cinema. It’s also good timing as the film has found itself lodged at the centre of film discourse in so many ways since its release last Friday (September 26th).Before we get into it, looking in depth at the film and the conversations and reactions it has provoked, the episode starts with a bang, of an announcement about the future of the podcast (no spoilers here), followed by a short ode to one of the great screen actors of all-time, Robert Redford, and how we have marked his passing in terms of their viewing choices. Their chat covers what made Redford such a unique, enigmatic Hollywood star, his on and off-screen legacies, including a lovely anecdote from Dario about seeing his final film, David Lowery’s The Old Man & The Gun (2018) at the London Film Festival.The second-half of the episode is given over to One Battle After Another. We unpack my love of PTA and how that informs his viewing of his films when they are released and the film’s approach to form and how it relates to the original text that inspired it, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which feels like a stronger source text than some reporting suggests. We go on to explore how Pynchon and PTA share a sense of juxtaposing zaniness with bone deep sadness at the way America is and has been, as well as what makes the cinematic spectacle and theatrical experience of the film so magnetic and rewarding.Then there’s the conversation around the film, that flows from the above but is contextual. They talk about the ‘takes’ and responses to the film, where critique feels valid and where it feels misguided. Much of this centres around the ideas of what a Hollywood film can and should do in terms of being revolutionary, and indeed what any film created in a capitalist structure can do, but also we unpack how the film might be read as a comment on revolutionary Cinema, what happens to revolutions over time, the ongoing revolution of resistance to white American control, and the impact of white revolutionaries in fights that they have the privilege of being able to walk away from to a large degree. And also, why this film, despite its incredible dynamism and grotesque operatic performances, is so damn sad.And if that whets your appetite for this season, we have you covered, this is just the beginning. From here, it’s one podcast after another. Sorry. Couldn’t resist. (NF) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

For the final [main] episode of this season, the 21st, we are delighted to welcome writer and podcaster John Bleasdale (Writers on Film) to the show, to discuss his excellent book on Terrence Malick, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick.Neil talks to John about his approach to research and interview/archive given the glaring lack of a central subject's voice, Malick and John's own relationship to the big themes around philosophy and faith, the power of understanding Malick's later period work anew through the lens of [auto]biography, and the ways that Malick's early work truly shifted American film language.Elsewhere Neil and Dario discuss Malick's work in thematic/aesthetic periods, how Malick used formal experimentation to explore biographical trauma and regret in his most divisive work, approaching famous people, and how books and podcasts provide valuable routes into engagement with film and cinema, to understanding wider contexts, particularly for challenging and envelope-pushing work.———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.comWelcome friends,It’s been an somewhat frustrating uneven week of film watching and writing. London’s recent heatwaves have nudged my daily routine into what has become a typical summer cadence - work kicking off around 6am and tapering off by early afternoon. It’s a strategy to placate my internal productivity tyrant: my focus is aided by the cooler mornings by 2pm I’ve kinda reached the limit of writing energy.This week though, the humdrum churn of life-admin has thrown a wrench into that flow. Those invisible hours spent on forms, emails, meetings, and the nebulous category of “developmental labour.”; the kind of tasks that don’t feed the present but one has to treat as investments in a deferred future.To be honest, Wimbledon hasn’t helped either. I’ve been watching - and playing - a lot of tennis (not at Wimbledon I hasten to add). If I think back, July always ends up as the month with the lightest film consumption for me. But that’s fine. Taking a break from a specific aspect of one cultural life can be holistically rejuvenating.What I have been watching, however, is a significant amount of student work. I'm currently supervising sixteen MA students on the Editing and Post-Production pathway, all working towards their final films. We had a full slate of tutorials on Monday, and - as always - there was a spectrum: some students presenting lucid, well-developed concepts with evidence of meaningful theoretical engagement, while others are still lost in the fog of first-draft thinking. Procrastination? Paralysis? Or just the slow gestation that creative work often demands? Or just outright laziness? As a teacher, one has to find a balance between gentle positive encouragement and lighting a fire under them. What struck me mid-way through that day, however, was the number of students were gravitating toward sound. Not just as a technical component, but as a thematic and/or conceptual focus.From experiments with film scores versus pop music in horror; to explorations of silence and non-silence in vertical editing structures; to reflexive work interrogating the female documentary voice, these students are wrestling with sonic textures as expressive tools. And that, in turn, got me thinking more acutely about my own long-standing interest in film sound. It’s an interest that's been shaped, deepened, and in some ways redefined by over a decade of podcasting and audio editing.Once again, it’s been spooky how the cinematic gods of serendipity work. It’s been fascinating to read through responses to the latest Filmstack Challenge #4, hosted by the brilliant Swabreen Bakr. If you're not already following her Substack Anti-Brain Rot, do yourself a favour and subscribe immediately. Her ability to interweave personal narrative with cultural critique, supported by sharp resource curation, offers some of the most vital film writing out this platform.Swabreen’s prompt for the FilmStack #4 challenge was:“For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.”It’s a elegant a timely provocation. But one that, as usual, had the potention to take me in various directions with the high chance of overthinking. But I also want to adopt the challenge in my own way. Primarily it offered me a chance to gather together strands of thinking not just about specific moments of sonic brilliance in cinema, but about how centrally I think about sound when considering cinematic form and experience.As I’ve argued in articles, interviews, and countless podcast episodes, my sensitivity to the sonic dimensions of film - the textures, rhythms, ruptures, and flows - didn’t originate from traditional film theory. It emerged from practice. From the labour of editing audio. From sculpting a vocal performance out of raw speech. From the meditative, occasionally maddening process of syncing tone, pace, silence, and breath. From constructing what I’ve called elsewhere a cinema for the ears.And in that labour, I came to understand sound not as accompaniment to the image, but as a constitutive force in cinematic experience - one that shapes mood, narrative logic, emotional resonance, and ultimately, meaning.* Interview with Michel Chion.In 2022, I had the privilege of speaking with Michel Chion - arguably the most influential figure in the study of film sound since the 1970s. Few scholars have shaped a subfield so decisively. From his early collaborations with Pierre Schaeffer in the musique concrète tradition to his theoretical breakthroughs in books like Audio-Vision (1993), The Voice in Cinema (1982), and Film, A Sound Art (2003), Chion has tirelessly advocated for sound not as an adjunct to image, but as an autonomous, irreducible mode of cinematic experience.Chion’s intellectual reach is vast. His writings span Tarkovsky and Tati, Lynch and Kubrick, all while balancing the rigour of film theory with his own film work. His background in experimental sound practice continues to inform his work: his writing is steeped in a sensory materialism, attentive to the textures, rhythms, and ruptures that occur when sound meets image in time.Two of his concepts, in particular, have become touchstones for anyone thinking seriously about film sound.Audio-vision refers to the audiovisual contract - the idea that when sound and image are experienced together, they don’t merely combine but mutually transform one another. We don’t just hear and see; we audio-view. Image affects how we hear, and sound affects how we interpret the image. This interplay is not additive, but alchemical. Sound can make a static shot dynamic, imbue silence with dread, or shift emotional valence without any visual cue. Audio-vision, in Chion’s terms, is not just perception - it is meaning-making.The second concept is that of the acousmêtre - a portmanteau of "acousmatic" (a sound we hear without seeing its source) and "être" (to be). An acousmêtre is a voice that is heard but not seen - disembodied, hovering in narrative space, often invested with mysterious or even godlike power. Classic examples include the Wizard of Oz before he’s revealed, or the unseen narrator in Sunset Boulevard. The acousmêtre can manipulate perception, disrupt narrative hierarchies, and unsettle the viewer’s sense of control. When the source of the voice is finally revealed- what Chion calls de-acousmatization-that power often collapses. The unseen has become seen, and with it, the aura dissolves.In our conversation—facilitated beautifully through live translation by Johanna Bramli, sound artist and colleague at the University of Brighton—Chion expanded on these ideas with both clarity and philosophical depth. What struck me most was his insistence that sound in cinema isn’t simply something to analyse after the image. It’s something that shapes perception at the very threshold of experience. Listening, for Chion, is a form of interpretation, but also a form of ethics: of attention, of attunement, of acknowledging that what is cinematic often extends through sound beyond the visual frame.There are show notes and links for the episode that are available for paying subscribers below.* The Cinematic Voice - Audio EssayIn March 2020, I edited an episode of The Cinematologists Podcast entitled The Cinematic Voice. The voice in cinema is, in many ways, a phenomenon we take for granted. Since the advent of the talkies, the synchronised speaking voice - tethered to the moving mouth and body on screen - has become the default mechanism for narrative exposition and character psychology. Yet, as Chion has long argued, this seamless synchronisation is one of sound cinema’s most persistent illusions, a sleight of hand that masks the artifice of audio-visual construction.This episode, one of our most ambitious productions, brings together leading film scholars and critics to explore the cinematic voice in all its textured complexity. Each contributor examines different dimensions: the star voice and its industrial aura, the interplay between script and performance, the sonic aesthetics of vocal timbre, the affective and narrative power of voice-over, the distinct dynamics of the animated voice, and the haunting disembodiment of acousmatic presences. We also interrogate the politics of the voice - who gets to speak, who is silenced, and how listening itself can be an ideological act.The is a complex and expansive edit that draws upon many films, but each contributor selected a key film for analysis. There are: In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison), Inherent Vice (2014 Norman Jewison), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jim Jarmusch), Félicité (2017, Alain Gomis), Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami), Annomalisa (2015, Charlie Kaufman), The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin), The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin). Formally, the episode is conceived as an audio essay: a sonic collage that cuts together interview segments with illustrative film clips and sound design. My intention was to create not just a piece of criticism, but an immersive experience - one that blurs the line between analytical discourse and artistic practice. I highly recommend listening with headphones to appreciate the full spatial depth of the mix.As always, Neil and I offer contextual reflections on the themes raised, but we also take a meta-critical approach, discussing how our production choices situate the episode within the broader ecology of film podcasting. In particular, we consider how formal experimentation in the audio realm can open up new ways of thinking about cinema; ways that aren’t tethered to the visual but that instead centre sound, rhythm, and vocal texture as primary modes of meaning-making.* The Lobster with Live Score from The Solemn QuartetBack in 2019, in another first for the Cinematologists, we are hugely excited to present The Lobster with a live score from the classical group the Solem Quartet and in association with Picturehouses cinemas. Live cinema events featuring musical accompaniments are becoming more prevalent as part of the auditorium experience; they echo cinema's past but also a look to the future as audiences seek out material experiences that go beyond or add onto traditional screenings, and perhaps look for a break from the digital. This event took place at the beautiful Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, to a packed house, I introduced the event and discussed the production with the musicians in a post-screening Q&A.Devised, arranged and performed by The Solem Quartet the screening included classic pieces including Beethoven op. 18/1, Shostakovich Quartet no. 8, Schnittke Quartet no. 2, Schnittke Quintet for Piano and Strings, Stravinsky 3 Pieces for String Quartet, Britten Quartet no. 1, Strauss Don Quixote. The music underscores beautifully the dark humour and surrealist milieu of Lanthimos' social satire.Winner of the 2014 Royal Over-Seas League Ensemble Competition, the Solem Quartet was formed in 2011 at the University of Manchester. The Quartet takes its name from the university's motto "arduus ad solem", meaning "striving towards the sun". In keeping with its name, the Solem Quartet’s first project was to play the Haydn Op. 20 “Sun” Quartets. Their repertoire is extensive, spanning the period from early Haydn to a broad spectrum of living composers including Larry Goves, Anna Meredith, John Luther Adams and Emily Howard, whose quartet ‘Afference’ they performed in a BBC Proms Extra broadcast, live on BBC Radio 3.* Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound - with director Midge CostinIn 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Midge Costin, a key figure in the world of Hollywood sound editing, about her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. The film is a dynamic, accessible, and richly detailed account of how sound design has shaped - and been shaped by - the evolution of American cinema. What makes this work so compelling is not just its archival reach or behind-the-scenes insight, but the way it reframes sound not as an adjunct to image but as part of the very DNA of the cinematic experience.Costin herself brings extraordinary authority to the subject. Her C.V. reads like a highlight reel of 1980s and 90s action cinema: The Rock, Armageddon, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide - all films where the visceral, bombastic soundscapes weren’t just background effects but narrative and emotional drivers. As a graduate of USC, she emerged from the same ecosystem that produced the likes of Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, and Gary Rydstrom - names that are now synonymous with modern sound design innovation. Her film pays homage to these figures but also positions them within a larger lineage of experimental, technical, and creative development.In our conversation, Costin spoke with great generosity and clarity about the often invisible labour of sound professionals - the way they work rhythmically, sculpturally, almost musically, to layer space, emotion, and movement into a film. Making Waves charts this work from the early studio era through the auteur-driven New Hollywood, right up to the digital present. What resonated most for me was how Making Waves links technical craft with aesthetic and emotional impact. This is not sound as ornament. It also demonstrates how experimental and intuitive sound practices have often led the way in film language, prefiguring visual innovation rather than merely following it. In this way, Costin’s documentary becomes an act of critical rebalancing-centering sound where it has too often been marginalised in the popular imagination of cinema history.As always, thanks for reading, watching, or listening.If you enjoyed this post and think to yourself yeah, I’d by this guy a coffee if he was in my local café please consider doing that virtually. It really does help sustain my work:I realise I’ve been meandering rather indulgently without actually addressing the core of Swabreen’s provocation. Here, then, are five films that I’ve selected in response to the challenge. Each offers a compelling instance where sound design is not simply functional or ornamental, but constitutive: woven into the narrative architecture, intimately bound to character psychology, and fundamental to the sensory-cognitive experience of the viewer - or rather, the audio-viewer. These are works where sound does more than support the image; it reshapes how we feel, interpret, and inhabit cinematic space.They’re all relatively recent films too. Not because I’m eschewing the canonical but because I wanted to highlight contemporary filmmakers who are experimenting with sonic form in ways that feel urgent, evocative, and formally compelling.Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)It’s hard to know where to begin with Memoria - a film that didn’t I simply watch but kind of inhabited. From the moment the first sound lands as guteral audio bomb - a low resonant thud, somewhere between an internal rupture and an external signal - we’re placed into a sensory riddle that is at once cosmic and deeply intimate. What challenged me most, and continues to haunt me, is the way Weerasethakul deploys sound not as atmospheric enhancement or narrative device, but as the film’s very ontology. The protagonist, played with ghostly precision by Tilda Swinton, becomes the conduit for a sound only she can hear. The sonic anomaly leads her, and us, on a journey that is less about resolution than attunement with the cosmos, no less. It’s also fascinated, in a satisfyingly technical way, with the practice of audio design. In the scene I’ve embedded below, a technician attempts to recreate the noise, becomes a metatextual reflection on cinematic sound itself: the labor of shaping waveforms into meaning, of aligning tone and affect in search of an elusive emotional truth. Throughout, the film’s quietude is not silence but attention. Every breath, every echo, every bird call seems choreographed to the rhythm of a consciousness slowly unfolding. The final act veers into the transcendent - part Kubrick, part Close Encounters, part psychedelic interior sci-fi - and while some may find that departure disorienting, for me it was the logical and lyrical destination of a film that dares to imagine sound as a portal, a memory, a time-machine. If you allow it Memoria vibrates within you, speaking directly to the body, to memory, to the uncanny pulses of lived experience.The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson, 2019)The Vast of Night is an underseen indie sci-fi, a nostalgic 1950s throwback that leverages sound not merely as ambiance, but as narrative architecture. What initially appears to be Cold War–era pastiche (radio crackle, switchboard plugs, magnetic tape hiss) becomes, through Patterson’s exacting design, the very substance of the story. From the opening scene, sound draws you in: cricket hums, distant train whistles, muffled cheers - all layered to situate us firmly in the sonic textual of small town nocturnal life. Yet it’s the “strange frequency” - interference on a switchboard line and then on radio - that catalyzes the plot. This unrecognisable sound, alternately eerie and compelling, slices through the calm, beckoning the characters - and the audience - into active listening and the feeling of dread. Moments of visual blackness punctuate the film, forcing a shift from the ocular to the auditory. In one standout sequence, we linger in total darkness or minimal framing as a military informant delivers a monologue. With nothing but voice, we are given a powerful reminder: that sound can conjure images more vividly than any frame can show.Working with a micro-budget (around $700K), Patterson embraces sonic minimalism as aesthetic strength. Every mechanical click, switchboard plugs, tape reels, radio dials, become a tactile beat in a larger rhythm, grounding the uncanny in the materiality of mid‑century tech. When the film suggests a climactic visual encounter, sound remains the true locus of mystery. In this way, The Vast of Night sidesteps genre spectacle and instead communes with the imagination via reverberation and resonance.Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019)In Sound of Metal, sound becomes intrinsic to the auditory point of view of the protagonist, Ruben, as he undergoes a traumatic and abrupt loss of hearing. From the opening drumming scene, the film situates us directly within the intense, visceral world of a punk-metal drummer, with mixed live sound that conveys energy without tipping into overwhelming realism. That initial auditory immersion sets the stage for everything that follows. We don’t just see his loss - we feel it. The subtle shifts in auditory perspective are calibrated to unsettle us both physically and psychologically, aligning us intimately with Ruben's disorientation and anxiety.The film also innovates by withholding subtitles for sign-language scenes, forcing hearing audiences to share in Ruben’s isolation. This absence of translation mirrors the soundscape’s own absences and ruptures. When Ruben receives cochlear implants, the “return” of sound is far from a restoration. It’s distorted, echo-laden, and painfully synthetic, a metallic approximation of what he once knew. Sound designer Nicolas Becker employed IRCAM filters and real-time earpieces to simulate Ruben’s auditory hallucinations, while editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen shaped the film’s rhythm so that both sound and silence become structural tools. The result is an immersive, embodied cinema in which sound design doesn’t just accompany the narrative, it’s a sculpting of Ruben’s evolving consciousness. Viewers aren’t simply observers; they inhabit his sensory world.For me, the film exemplifies sound as cinematic empathy; probing what it means to lose a sense we take for granted, and how its absence, distortion, and partial return become the emotional textures of a deeply human narrative.Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley, 2017)Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House is an elemental work - one that refuses conventional narrative and instead immerses the viewer in a liminal, quasi-apocalyptic world of forests, clouds, darkness, and decay. The film’s visual textures, often described as painterly or expressionistic, are matched, if not surpassed, by its monumental use of sound. Barley constructs a sonic environment that resists being merely “naturalistic.” Instead, what we hear is hyper-natural - rain not as weather but as a metaphysical cascade, wind as ancestral whisper, thunder as tectonic force.In the podcast conversation I had with Scott, he speaks of sound as the “breath” of the film, something that not only supports the images but also conjures presences and absences. Many of the sounds in the film are heavily manipulated field recordings, stretched or layered to the point where they become uncanny - recognisable yet alien. This is particularly effective in conjuring a temporal dissonance: we are suspended in time, and the sound is what holds us there. It builds without crescendo, it drones without monotony. The forest in Sleep Has Her House doesn’t speak in language, but it does hum, roar, and exhale in ways that suggest both the sublime and the sentient.Barley also describes working with sound spatially - designing the mix so that the sound doesn’t just surround the viewer but seems to move through them. In that sense, the film’s sound design becomes a kind of immersive sculpture. Silence is just as crucial: long stretches of near-inaudibility heighten our awareness, demanding deep listening. These voids are not empty, but dense with potential, pulling the viewer into a contemplative state that is bodily as much as intellectual.Barley draws on the affective potential of what he calls “tonal atmospheres,” creating a resonant field in which emotions are not imposed but emerge slowly, almost geologically. The result is not sound as accompaniment, but sound as ontology - Sleep Has Her House breathes, murmurs, rages, and finally retreats, leaving you with the sense that you’ve experienced not a story, but an event, or even a visitation.The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)The Zone of Interest is a film defined by what it refuses to show. Set just beyond the walls of Auschwitz, Jonathan Glazer constructs an aesthetic of horror through omission; eschewing the visual spectacle of suffering for something more insidious and, in many ways, more ethically confronting. Johnny Burn’s sound design envelops the viewer in a ceaseless, inescapable sonic architecture: dogs barking, trucks idling, furnaces groaning, constant screams incessant pain. These aren’t occasional background textures, they are the relentless, ambient condition of the nightmare reality.And yet the characters, specific the Höss family who head Rudolf is commander of auschwitz, are able, somehow, to seemingly tune it out. They tend their garden, host tea on the lawn, and dote on their children - all while genocide unfolds away from their, and our eyes. The horror is acousmatic: we hear it, we feel it, but we do not see it. And that’s precisely Glazer’s intent. The moral violence here lies not in the act itself, but in the ability to normalise its sound. The runtime is modest, but the experience feels punishing, because it tasks the audience not with watching atrocity, but with listening through the veil of everyday life that allows it to persist. It produces a physiological sensation of dread, a kind of sonic abjection, that for me built into almost a physical sickness. This is sound design not as expression, but as sustained exposure.The Zone of Interest doesn’t dramatise the Holocaust; it constructs an immersive spatialisation of complicity. What the characters witness, choose to ignore, or directly perpetrate is not the central concern in the way it is in most Holocaust films. Instead, the film explores the terrifying depth of psychological compartmentalisation: how atrocity can be absorbed into the background of daily life, even in the face of a relentless aural experience that should penetrate every fibre of one’s moral being. For the audience, it becomes not just a question of endurance: over the course of the film, the cumulative weight of this inescapable off-screen nightmare implicates us in its presence. It is a study in complicity, where the sound design lives in the liminal space between knowing and imagining.If you are a paid subscriber, I really appreciate your support. Adrian joined this month, your physical postcard I am going to write in the London sunshine at my favourite coffee house, this weekend. If you enjoy the work I do here please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only £5 per month (or £50) for the year. The main thing is that you’ll be supporting more work in my main area of making film theory and film studies relevant and accessible (along with posts on non-cinema related subjects). You get access to the full spectrum of resources that I put up here.For Paid Subscribers below is a extensive reference list of books and articles that helped shape the content above. Also there is list of links to many of the film clips that were used to create the podcast, examples of the use of cinematic sound some very well know others more obscure. For anyone who wants to go into a deep dive.Also, if anything here strikes you as interesting, useful, or even mildly amusing, feel free to share it in the Substack app or on any of those other platforms we like to decry - but also can’t live without. Sharing and commenting (not just liking) is a gesture of curatorial practice and a small act of resistance against complicity with the algorithmic overlords.

With the podcast half-way through its tenth year it is a privilege to welcome back a former contributor to the show - read his piece on Clueless for The New Statesman that coincided with his previous appearance on the show - and long-time champion of The Cinematologists, Ryan Gilbey.Ryan's return is to promote and discuss his new book, the astoundingly good, It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema, published this month (June 2025) by Faber.Around the release date, I (Neil) sat down in Cinema 1 at the Barbican in London to discuss the book, the form(s) of Queer Cinema, Ryan's journey with his sexuality and how cinema is entwined and implicated, being a film obsessive, and the comfort of lists. It was a profound privilege to sit with an old friend to talk about his amazing work and this art form that we both love so much. Around this conversation, Dario and I discuss Queer representation and the cinema as a transgressive space, ownership and authorship of texts, and the way that the cinema space affects not only the viewing of a film but in this case, the experience of talking about film. Finally, we talk about the film End of the Century (Castro, 2019, Argentina) - I mistakenly describe it as a Spanish film in the episode, apologies - the film that accompanied my visit to the Barbican to see Ryan, and also the film that magically ends his transcendent and moving book.This episode of The Cinematologists is dedicated to Barney Gilbey.———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

We're back with an episode featuring just Neil and myself discussing a cinematic topic we both are invested in: The crime/heist genre. The core of this chat is an examination of how the structures of the genre intersect with social, racial, and economic contexts in four specific films. Sparked by our shared admiration for Justin Kurzel's The Order, we trace the lineage of socially conscious crime narratives from classic noir to contemporary thrillers. We consider genre cinema's desire to convey a sense of prestige - think of the notion of elevated horror - and revisit some of the core theoretical foundations of genre as a self-contained system, as proposed by thinkers such as Steve Neale and Rick Altman. Then we tackle four films as case studies:The Order (2023) - Justin KurzelOdds Against Tomorrow (1959) – Robert WiseCollateral (2004) – Michael MannWidows (2018) – Steve McQueenWe analyse how each of these films, in varying ways, deploy genre frameworks to narrate the struggle for power, identity, and survival, and we interrogate the evolving relationship between cinematic pleasure and political subtext.ShownotesRick Altman - Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999)Neil Fox - Ashley Clark Curates BFI's Black Star - Director's NotesLuis M. Garcia-Mainar - Say it with generic maps: Genre, identity and flowers in Michael Mann’s Collateral - Screening the PastSteve Neale - Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)Cayton Purdom - Mann Men - Los Angeles Review of Books———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

As part of this year's Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, currently running in London, Michael Brooke has curated a complete retrospective of the criminally under-known Polish director Wojciech Has. The retrospective, starting from the 1st April 2025 and featuring screenings at the BFI and the ICA, contains Has's short and feature film work in gorgeous restorations. There are talks and events around the films, and the ICA has an exhibition of Polish film posters which is unmissable if you're in the vicinity.For this episode, Neil talks to curator Michael Brooke about Has's life and work, and legacy both within Poland and to a certain extent more widely. They also discuss the limitations of legacy due to decisions made by Has to stay in Poland. The conversation also covers Has's work as a film educator, Polish cinema more broadly and Michael's route to becoming an expert in the field, shedding light on how sometimes, things just happen that way. Elsewhere in the episode Neil and Dario discuss the impact of Has's work on them, at a time when both are particularly invested in the idea of the cinematic, where it can be found contemporarily and the need to engage with form intentionally as audiences, critics and filmmakers and not get drawn into the anodyne world of content that dominates screen culture generally. They discuss Has's work as a formal master, his approach to adaptation and the idea of filmmakers being in dialogue with each other despite the limitations of visibility of work, physical and political borders.———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

It was an absolute joy to welcome actor, director, producer and writer Mario van Peebles to The Cinematologists Podcast. In London to show his new film Outlaw Posse as part of the Black Rodeo season at the BFI, I was able to talk with him and his son Mandela, who also stars in the film, about his lifelong interest in Westerns, particularly in the often cliched, often forgotten role of African American's in the Western mythos.Outlaw Posse is more of a companion piece than a sequel to his 1993 film Posse; this new work mines similar territory with its generic rawness infused with social commentary but with a kinetic direction that embraces spectacle.The conversation also covers the van Peebles' legacy; Mario's father Melvin one of the true blaxploitation pioneers, director of the now recognised classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadass Song; Mario's own journey in the industry, from his big break in Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge to his own seminal work as director of New Jack City.Neil and I discuss how wonderfully open and insightful Mario and Mandela were in the interview and further explore his perhaps under-appreciated body of work. We discuss the influence of New Jack City thinking about how that film triggered the New Black Cinema movement and influenced the aesthetics of 80s and 90s filmmaking in its wake._________For extra bonus content, including extended interviews, bonus podcast and our monthly newsletter consider joining our Patreon community: www.patreon.com/cinematoloigists _________You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we'll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show._____Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

We kick off season 21 and the tenth year of The Cinematologists with a special conversation with Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants about his work on recent release, Small Things Like These, written by Enda Walsh (Hunger) and starring and produced by Cillian Murphy.In the conversation, Neil and Tim discuss film form and style, particularly the use of close-up, space and the Gothic, masculinity, grief and how being an outsider can provide a unique take on the material and experiences of people from a place that is not one's own.Elsewhere, Neil and Dario dig down into this idea of who gets to tell whose stories, the role of audience and character perception in understanding a film's perspective, and they discuss the upcoming season, which marks a decade since the podcast started and features the usual broad range of topics, guests and points of entry, with a big name surprise early on!Thanks to Alex Morris from Alternate Current PR for setting this up.Small Things Like These is on digital platforms now and Blu-ray and DVD 3 February—You can listen to The Cinematologists for free wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We also produce an extensive monthly newsletter and bonus/extended content that is available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists. You can become a member for only £3 per month.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it), and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast so please do that if you enjoy the show.—Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe