Episodes

Bertrand Bonello is one of the few working filmmakers for whom arthouse is genuinely not a cliche — because his films refuse arthouse conventions as deliberately as they refuse mainstream ones. The Beast, with Lea Seydoux, moves through three time periods and several genres, asking what it means to be a feeling person in an era that rewards the erasure of feeling. In conversation with Hugo, Bonello discusses how Lynch and Jarmusch seep into his work unconsciously, what Seydoux’s acting approach requires of a director, and why his films keep returning to collective social anxieties rather than individual psychology.

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.

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?

Sofia Coppola has built an auteur cinema out of the specific emotional texture of femininity, privilege, and the particular loneliness of women who have everything except what they actually want. With guest Sacha Gertsik, the podcast traces her filmography from The Virgin Suicides to Priscilla — asking what distinguishes a genuine auteur from the nepo baby label that criticism sometimes substitutes for analysis. From Lost in Translation to the Converse shoes in Marie Antoinette: an episode about a filmmaker who made the girl era a serious aesthetic position long before anyone else named it.

Hayao Miyazaki made films for children that contain more truth about loss, mortality, and the difficulty of living than most adult cinema can manage. This episode explores the deep magic of Studio Ghibli — the hand-drawn worlds, the absent parents, the flying machines, the spirits in the landscape — and asks what it means to tell children that life is beautiful and terrifying and worth it. From My Neighbor Totoro to Princess Mononoke to The Boy and the Heron: an episode about a filmmaking philosophy built on genuine belief in the audience’s capacity to feel.

Hope is political. If you have hope then you have confidence you can change things. After sixty years of filmmaking, Ken Loach arrives at what may be his most urgent film yet — a story of solidarity between a Syrian refugee community and the last pub in a dying English mining town. Speaking with Elliot, Loach discusses The Old Oak as both a political act and a love letter to the people that mainstream cinema consistently ignores. He explains why he never runs out of stories when there are still everyday people whose lives deserve to be on screen — and why solidarity is not a soft word but a radical one.

In the weeks following Hamas’s October 7th attacks and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Celebrating Cinema turns to Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers — one of cinema’s most forensic examinations of colonial violence and the conditions that produce resistance. The episode asks what it means to watch this film now, how cinema can try to make sense of atrocities without instrumentalising them, and what the French colonial mindset Pontecorvo documented reveals about contemporary systems of occupation. A sober, necessary episode made in the urgency of the present.

Closing the Future Frames series: Bram Ruiter is a filmmaker for whom the mechanics of cinema are the subject of cinema. Not interested in traditional narrative structures, he experiments with the elements of film itself — taking them apart to see how they work, and what happens when they work differently. For this edition of Future Frames, Bram discusses the inner life of the moving image with Elliot: what it means to be obsessed with the form itself rather than the stories it typically tells.