Can you believe this is Pop Screen’s first animated film? Better late than never, as Gav Smith of My Favourite Film rejoins us to talk about Interstella 5555 – The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A story as epic as its frankly overlong title, it was created by Daft Punk as […]
Pop Screen
Cher & Moonstruck – Pop Screen Episode 58
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a-Moonstruck, a film which is not exactly subtle in its depiction of Italian-American culture but is at least witty, well-written and full of heart, thanks to its script by John Patrick Shanley. This week, Pop Screen closes out […]
Queen Latifah & Chicago – Pop Screen 57
Pop Screen’s Oscar month continues with one of the 21st century’s biggest collectors of little bald gold men – Rob Marshall’s Chicago. Among its twelve nominations and six wins was a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1990s hip-hop stalwart Queen Latifah, who gets a solo number crammed with innuendo, but […]
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – Pop Screen 56
Pop Screen’s Oscar month goes back to, er, 2021 with the film widely predicted to win Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Less a biopic of the titular blues singer and more a drama about temptation and (often racial) exploitation adapted from August Wilson’s play, it […]
HAIM & Licorice Pizza – Pop Screen 55
Licorice Pizza (2021) Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson March is Oscar month on Pop Screen, and as luck would have it one of this year’s frontrunners is absolutely made for us. A goofy, shaggy 1970s coming-of-age comedy featuring a Tom Waits cameo, the entire band HAIM and their parents – seriously, […]
Jim Morrison & The Doors – Pop Screen 54
What kind of film do you think the above image is from, listeners? If you answered “Why, a biopic of a 1960s rock band, of course”, congratulations – you are Oliver Stone, and this is an episode of Pop Screen about your 1991 film The Doors. Join Doors fan Aidan […]
Norah Jones + My Blueberry Nights (Pop Screen 53)
Back in 2007, Wong Kar-Wai could have done anything for his first American film. What he chose to do was cast easy-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones in a road movie where she would play alongside David Straithairn, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Natalie Portman, and tell her not to take acting […]
Frank Sinatra + The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Pop Screen 52
The 1960s were, depending on your viewpoint, either the best or the worst time to release a film about political assassinations, and there weren’t many wilder examples than John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. A wildly paranoid tale of a returning military veteran convinced that one of his brothers-in-arms is now […]
Vanilla Ice + Cool As Ice – Pop Screen Episode 51
Looky looky at our black booky: this week Pop Screen is looking at an artefact of the utmost early ’90sness, Vanilla Ice’s first and only starring vehicle Cool As Ice. Deeply influenced by the teen rebel films of the 1950s and shot by Spielberg’s future DoP Janusz Kaminski, these classy […]
Nirvana + Cobain – Montage of Heck – Pop Screen 49
Pop Screen makes another foray into the documentary realm this week, with Aidan rejoining regular host Graham to look at Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. An ambitious film rooted as much in its subject’s imagination as it is the facts of his life, it was highly acclaimed […]