Fucking Amal is not just a Swedish coming-of-age film — it's one of the great documents of adolescent longing, and its evolution into a queer classic says something true about how cinema finds its audience across time. Director Lukas Moodysson joins Hugo to discuss what it meant to make a film this close to his own teenage experience, how its emotional directness has survived decades of cultural change, and why the themes at the core of his work — rebellion, loneliness, sincerity, humour — keep returning regardless of the form they arrive in.
The Netherlands consumes cinema from abroad with appetite but has historically been less good at celebrating its own. With the re-release of George Sluizer's Spoorloos — one of the great Dutch films — the podcast asks why. Is it cultural insecurity, expressed through the dominance of vacation romcoms? Is it the absence of an infrastructure that would allow genuine auteur filmmaking to develop? And how is the next wave of Dutch filmmakers responding to the gap between Dutch cinema's potential and its self-image?
Bill and Turner Ross make documentary cinema that feels like social experiment — giving their subjects freedom and following whatever truth that freedom produces. Gasoline Rainbow is their boldest test: five Gen-Z teenagers given a car and the American road, with no script and no destination. In conversation with Elliot, the Ross Brothers discuss what cinema can find when it stops controlling the outcome, why American documentary has become too cautious, and what happened when the teenagers decided to perform their most honest selves anyway.
What makes us fall for a film star? Actor Mike Gomez joins the podcast to examine the alchemy of screen performance — from Marlon Brando's shadow over every method actor that followed to the question of whether today's bankable names are influencers more than actors. The conversation circles cinema's oldest seduction: the performer who makes you forget the camera is there, who makes you forget yourself entirely. An episode about what it actually means to act on screen — and why we keep believing in bodies we know are performing.
Sean Price Williams has been the cinematographer behind some of the most vital American indie films of the past decade. The Sweet East is his directorial debut — an exhilarating road trip across the fractured landscape of the American East Coast that functions as both genre film and cultural satire. In conversation with Sophie, Williams and star Talia Ryder discuss the film's eclectic influences and what it feels like to make something genuinely strange in a landscape of controlled, predictable films. A conversation about the freedom that comes from having nothing to lose and a very specific vision.
Baloji came to filmmaking from rap and visual art, and Augure — his debut feature — carries the poetry and formal daring of both. A story about identity and grief set between Belgium and the Congo, the film explores the weight of a name that means evil sorcerer in colonial contexts and what it means to carry that into the world. In conversation with Elliot, Baloji unpacks the cultural collisions at the heart of his work, his approach to mixing Western and African cinematic forms, and why a first film should be the most personal film you ever make.
Written a year after AI experts called for a development pause that never happened, this essay asks what artificial intelligence actually means for those of us who love cinema. Less interested in the dystopian robot narratives than in the practical question: what happens when the labour of making images becomes automatable? To the cinematographers, editors, visual effects artists, actors whose likenesses are already being traded without their consent. A piece that tries to be honest about the uncertainty rather than pretend the question has already been settled.
From Fritz Lang's robot Maria to HAL 9000 to the uncomfortable emotional realism of Her, cinema has been processing its anxiety about artificial intelligence since before the technology existed to make that anxiety practical. This episode traces AI's role in cinema's imagination — why the portrayals are so consistently dystopian, what those choices reveal about our actual fears, and how the current moment — where AI is no longer science fiction but an industry tool — changes the conversation entirely. An episode that takes the question seriously rather than resolving it too quickly.
Nicolas Cage is cinema's great misunderstood radical. In an era where naturalism dominates screen acting, Cage's almost avant-garde approach — what he calls nouveau shamanic — refuses the comfortable and the plausible. From Face/Off to Mandy, from Leaving Las Vegas to The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, his body of work is weirder, richer, and more daring than its reputation suggests. This episode takes Cage seriously as an artist — exploring what makes him genuinely unique, why he polarises critics, and why the performances most likely to get laughed at are often the ones that last longest in the memory.
Saltburn sent the internet into a frenzy over sex scenes that, on closer inspection, might not have been quite as radical as the discourse suggested. Entertainment journalist Laura Gommans joins the podcast to ask what happened to the sex scene — from the 1990s unapologetic intimacy (Basic Instinct, Wild Things, Eyes Wide Shut) to an era in which studio films seem embarrassed by physical desire. Is this a cultural evolution or a corporate retreat? And if streaming is part of the problem, what does that say about the audiences streaming platforms think they're serving?
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