From the alien drifter of The Man Who Fell to Earth to the unforgettable Goblin King of Labyrinth, David Bowie built a film career as singular as his music career and considerably less discussed. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms trace Bowie's relationship with cinema across four decades — what drew him to the screen, what he was doing that other musicians who attempted acting were not, and why certain performances (The Prestige, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) hold up as genuine acting rather than celebrity appearances. An episode about a complete artist who kept finding new forms to inhabit.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, and cinema has been retelling it ever since — mostly getting it wrong. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms ask the central question: is the monster a misunderstood outcast, an abandoned child who never asked to exist, or a cautionary tale about men who play God? And more urgently: why is he always ugly when the novel never required it? Tracing the monster through James Whale's 1931 original, Hammer Horror, and The Bride — an episode about what we've done to a story that was always, at its heart, about responsibility.
At the Berlinale, Wim Wenders declared that cinema is not political. Elliot Bloom and Kiriko Mechanicus — both speaking from their own diasporic experiences — decided to test that claim. Moving through Persepolis, Incendies, Bend It Like Beckham, Girlhood, and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, they explore how diaspora cinema transforms the politics of borders and belonging into something deeply, unavoidably human. An episode about what it means to live between cultures — and why the cinema that insists it is not political is often the most political cinema of all.
Social media has decided that both Marty Supreme and Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights are Films That Must Be Discussed — but are they worth the discourse they've generated? Hugo Emmerzael questions whether the outrage over Heathcliff's latest reimagining deserves our energy, suggesting the film may be more interesting when taken at face value. Meanwhile, Laura traces the marketing machinery behind Marty Supreme and asks: at what point does the anticipation become the experience — and does the film survive that pressure?
Sirat — Óliver Laxe's Cannes entry — follows a father searching for his daughter through a world dissolving into rave and borderland and bass. DJ and film composer Kangding Ray joins Hugo Emmerzael to discuss the specific challenge of carrying rave culture's ethos into cinema without sanitising it, and what it means to build a film around sound as primary sensation. A conversation between two artists who work in immersion — one in clubs, one on screen — about what happens when the dancefloor becomes the cinema.
Cultural critic Esje Seigfried joins Laura Gommans twenty years after Brokeback Mountain to ask what queer cinema inherited from Ang Lee's devastating film — and what it's still working to move beyond. The genre's history of tragedy as default, of grief as proof of love's seriousness: has queer cinema found its way to other kinds of stories? From Happy Together to Heartstopper, an episode about the right to a wider emotional range — and the persistent question of whether the actors performing queer love need to be queer themselves.
Park Chan-wook may have made his masterpiece. Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael break down No Other Choice — a film that uses the thriller genre to dissect middle-class aspiration, debt, and the slow violence of economic systems — and find it operating at the level of Park's best Korean work. The episode also weighs in on the Oscar nominations and marks the 45th anniversary of Kubrick's The Shining — a film, they argue, that Kubrick would have made differently today, and that Stephen King was always right to resist.
The death of Brigitte Bardot — screen legend, vocal far-right sympathiser — reignites the question that contemporary culture keeps failing to resolve: can we separate the art from the artist? Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael approach the question as critics with a responsibility to their own viewing practices. From Polanski to Leni Riefenstahl, from cancel culture's logic to the history of artists whose lives were monstrous and whose work mattered: what do we owe our own aesthetic experiences — and what do we owe the people those artists harmed?
Chloé Zhao's Hamnet — a film about Shakespeare and grief — becomes the occasion for a wider excavation: the movies that are, secretly or openly, adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. From 10 Things I Hate About You to Ran, from She's Gotta Have It to The Lion King, Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael trace the persistent hold of the plays on cinema's imagination. The episode also finds space for Richard Linklater's Blue Moon — and the discovery that Ethan Hawke is magnetic in just about anything he chooses to be in.
Mstyslav Chernov's 2000 Metres to Andriivka is one of the most immersive war documentaries ever made — and its almost video-game-like quality prompts Kiriko Mechanicus and Hugo Emmerzael to ask fundamental questions about why we watch documentary films at all. What does the form offer that fiction cannot? What are the ethics of filming in the middle of active combat? And in an era when images of war circulate constantly through social media, what is the specific responsibility of the filmmaker who decides to compose rather than simply capture?
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