All aboard the Louise Brooks train for the silent cinema legend’s wildest, nastiest and undeniably most hobo-packed outing: 1928’s Beggars of Life. Director William Wellman was coming off the back of the first-ever Best Picture Oscar winner, Wings. Is this a worthy successor? Off the Shelf kicks off with a […]
Cinema Eclectica
Flash Gordon – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 266
OK, place your bets now: how long before someone does a Brian Blessed impersonation? This week’s Cinema Eclectica is headlined by Mike Hodges outrageous Flash Gordon – and if you think the director of Get Carter was an odd choice, wait until you hear who nearly directed it. In Off […]
Shadowman – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 265
Put on your best old lady disguise and alert your ninja secretaries! Our director’s lottery came out with Georges Franju recently, which means this week Tim and Graham are watching his deliriously silly pulp oddity Nuits Rouges, aka Shadowman. Is this final film from the Eyes Without a Face director […]
The Old Guard – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 264
A tale of two action movies on this week’s Eclectica. On the one hand, you have the huge Netflix-funded star vehicle The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron and Chiwetel Ejiofor. On the other, you have the smaller, foreign-language judo film Throw Down, directed by Johnnie To and released on Blu-Ray […]
The People Under the Stairs – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 263
A double-bill of genre-bending horror movies this week, which makes it all the stranger that we struggled to think of recommendations to watch with our Film of the Week. Sometimes we are very dumb. Said Film of the Week is the latest product of our Directors Lottery system, Wes Craven’s […]
The Assistant – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 262
Cinema Eclectica is back for another round-up of the latest streaming titles, this week taking in America and Romania via Japan. First up, Rob lauds Julia Garner’s performance in #MeToo drama The Assistant, then Graham is off to Tokyo with frequent flier Werner Herzog for his haunting new film Family […]
The Phantom Carriage – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 261
This week’s podcast is a slow swan-dive from arthouse bliss into a swamp of sleaze, starting – after a Question of the Week that baits the Oscars more than Stephen Daldry – with Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage. An inspiration to Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, it still holds up […]
Wasp Network – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 260
Fans of podcasts where two people can’t agree on a single film, your ship has come in, because this week Graham and Tim are reviewing Olivier Assayas’s divisive Netflix original Wasp Network! Which reviewer compared it to “a Communist version of The A-Team”? And, more importantly, did they mean it […]
La Strada – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 259
Does anyone want a podcast about famous directors’ Instagram feeds? While we workshop that, there’s a lot to get through this week, not least a review of Federico Fellini’s landmark film La Strada. Where does it end up in our Fellini power rankings? After a Question of the Week about […]
1917 – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 258
It’s been a while since we did a B-sides show – those intermittent collections of new cinema releases that we didn’t cover at the time of release. And that’s largely because, er, there aren’t any cinemas open – but that doesn’t stop Sarah, Rob and Graham from having some films […]