John Singleton was 21 - 21! - when he made one of the most acclaimed debuts of the 1990s, one which led to him becoming the first African-American to get a Best Director nomination at the Oscars. It would be the perfect punchline if it was bad, but annoyingly for this deeply unserious podcast it's great: a frontline dispatch from a world plagued by violence and poverty that still feels vital, and also finds room for more humour and tenderness than you might expect. Join Rob and Graham as...

Sam Taylor-Johnson is about to release Back to Black, her second music biopic following 2009's Nowhere Boy. So naturally Pop Screen decided to review... her EL James adaptation? Yeah, why not, it's got Rita Ora in it. Returning co-host Joe did a lot of Ritasearch for this podcast and was delighted to remember that she only has about a minute of screentime. Not that there's any shortage of other things to talk about when it comes to 50 Shades of Grey. Its status as a cultural phenomenon, its...

There are some pop movies that capture the appeal of an entire genre. Such was the case with Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, a crime drama that was such a hit it essentially popularised reggae in the United States. Such things are possible only with a star of the calibre of Jimmy Cliff, plus soundtrack and screen appearances from the likes of Toots and the Maytals and Prince Buster. This week, Aidan rejoins Graham to talk about Henzell's film, and uncover the reason why he might be...

In 2024, Pop Screen is spending a month in Jamaica, hailing the island's mighty presence in the field of music. And to kick off, we're talking about... er, 10cc? Yes, when they said they don't like reggae, they love it, few could have expected that love would manifest itself in multi-instrumentalist Lol Creme directing a 1991 Jamaican comedy about a small-town eccentric who thinks he can talk to trees, cows and cricket balls becoming involved with a lusty German photographer. As you...

In 2004, the veteran Welsh rock band The Alarm pulled off an audacious hoax, releasing their single '45 RPM' under the alias of The Poppy Fields. The Poppy Fields were supposedly a new band of teenage rock stars in skinny jeans, as was the style at the time. As the song ascended the charts, Alarm mainman Mike Peters revealed the deception, kicking off a debate about ageism in the music industry. It's a fascinating story, so fascinating that Mick has dragged himself out of his sickbed to talk...

Good vibes only this week, as Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult rejoins the podcast to talk about Cyndi Lauper's lead role in the 1988 supernatural comedy Vibes. A film so inspired by Ghostbusters that Dan Aykroyd was briefly attached to star, it has an enviable cast fronted by Lauper, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Falk. And yet, somehow, it tanked. On this episode of Pop Screen, then, we attempt to solve the timeless Fortean mystery of why people didn't watch this at the time, taking detours to talk...

Memo to you: Pop Screen is back for 2024 and we're covering one of the wildest, most controversial and most ambitious rock movies of the 1970s. Starring Mick Jagger among a motley cast of models, gangsters, boxers and one father of a national embarrassment, Performance saw Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell join forces for a joint debut like no other. On this episode, Rob and Graham reunite to talk about the film's turbulent production, its difficult journey into a form Warner Brothers - who...

Last week, our sister podcast Uncut took you through January through to June in our two-part review of 2023. Now, Pop Screen takes up the reigns with Vincent, Naomi, Rob, Graham, Kat, Simon, Mike, Oliver and James all returning to give their favourite films of the second half of the year - culminating in that all-important top ten. What will make the cut? Who did Barbenheimer on the day of release? How many diverging opinions on Saltburn can we get? And who put the Puss in Boots sequel above...

Pop Screen finishes 2023 with a movie that could not be less stock to our ears - Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Granted unprecedented levels of access to the world's biggest heavy metal band, the directors of the Paradise Lost trilogy made a raw documentary about a band somehow staying together and making an album despite unprecedented personal turmoil. The punchline: the album they make is St. Anger, perhaps the most reviled album in their back catalogue...

All we want for Christmas is this: Mariah Carey's notorious film vehicle is the subject of Pop Screen's festive episode. Equally reviled and unfortunate, it's the tale of a foster child who grows up into an aspiring singer, and whose rise to fame is, shall we say, subtly patterned on Carey's own career. Its soundtrack album was released on 9/11, which stymied its commercial potential. That inspired a #JusticeforGlitter campaign many years later; the film was less fortunate. On this year's...

Get ready for (a) love (-in): Graham is joined once again by the Uncut Network's Rob for a look at Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard's massively acclaimed sort-of documentary about Nick Cave. As well as providing an intimate look at the Australian legend's creative process and history, it also features appearances from his deeply unexpected celebrity friends: Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue, together at last! Along the way, there's time to consider the idiosyncratic concert demands of Nina...

On this week's Pop Screen, Graham has a very important and special guest: Mark's dog! And, fine, yes, also Mark, with our favourite quizmaster and Film Stories writer coming back to talk about Russell T Davies's most personal drama. Set across the early years of the AIDS crisis, It's a Sin has a cast full of breakthrough young stars, memorable cameos from acting veterans, plus Olly Alexander, whose day job in Years and Years allows us to cover the show. Not that we need much of an excuse to...

Our Halloween special is over and done with, but this week Graham faces his most terrifying challenge yet - enjoying a film about jazz. If you're going to watch one film about jazz, though, Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight is the one to watch. Its bona fides are impeccable: named after a Thelonious Monk song, starring Dexter Gordon, with a score by Herbie Hancock and inspired by the lives of Lester Young and Bud Powell. That's a lot of jazz, and fortunately Aidan is back on the show to...

Oh god, Graham's shining the spooky light under his face again - sounds like time for a Halloween special. And it is, with Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult joining the show once again to talk about The Haunted House of Horror, a 1960s British horror movie with an all-bases-covered title. It's the familiar tale of a group of horny and stupid teens who go to an old house for a seance and end up beset by entities even older and more sinister than Frankie Avalon, the Beach Blanket Bingo star who...

Don't call it a comeback! Literally, given the number of alternative titles Pete Walker's 1978 chiller goes under. Best-known as The Comeback, stars crooner Jack Jones as crooner Nick Cooper - a stretch, then - who is all fresh from a stay in rehab and ready to record his comeback album. The process is interrupted by artistic conflicts, record industry politics, scary ghosts and a hag-masked killer armed with a sickle. Not necessarily in that order. The first in Pop Screen's 2023 Halloween...

When we announced a month of Madonna-themed movies, we could have just looked at her acting performances, maybe a documentary or two. Instead, we felt like it was our journalistic duty to blow the lid off her steamy affair with 'Weird' Al Yankovic. That's just one of the extremely accurate facts contained in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a merciless lampoon of biopic cliches which Weird Al superfan Jeff is back on the podcast to discuss with Graham. The film immediately received attention...

This week, Pop Screen is showing you Dick. As part of our ce-e-le-bration of the fortieth anniversary of Madonna's breakthrough single Holiday, we're taking you back to 1990, when Warren Beatty became one of the few men to ever tell her what to do as he directed his then-partner in the comic book hit of the summer, Dick Tracy. Obviously, the landscape of comic book adaptations has changed since the days when a 1930s detective strip was a box office smash and Captain America was the subject...

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but Pop Screen says: welcome to our episode on Poly Styrene: I am a Cliche! Co-directed by Celeste Bell in collaboration with Paul Sng, it follows Bell's journey to explore her late mother's iconic time with the punk band X-Ray Spex, as well as her troubled life and - more important than it sounds, this - her one-of-a-kind fashion sense. The documentary is based closely on the book Day-Glo, by Bell and Zoe Howe, and on this episode...

This week, Mark Harrison from Film Stories rejoins Pop Screen to taunt Graham about one of his most extravagantly failed predictions. Remember our The Dead Don't Die episode? Where we looked at that film's star Austin Butler's upcoming movies and decided there was no way an Elvis biopic was going to make bank in 2022? WELL... Actually, the strangest thing is not that it made money, but that we enjoyed it. Join Mark and Graham as they discuss their mixed feelings towards Baz Luhrmann, the...

It's our 100th episode! And what better way to celebrate than to look back at one of the great musical flops of all time, 1980's Xanadu. Starring Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly and a guy from The Warriors, it's the story of a Greek Muse sent to Earth on a mission to inspire. If she knew she was going to inspire him to make a swing dancing/roller disco fusion club, she'd have stayed on Mount Olympus. One of the films that led to the foundation of the Golden Raspberry awards, Xanadu...

After last week's voyage into self-importance courtesy of U2, Pop Screen tackles a film that couldn't possibly be more lightweight - the 1965 teen comedy Beach Ball. Strange, as it features one of the most tortured souls in '60s pop - Scott Walker - and one of its defining divas, Diana Ross. But this is an entry in the brief but prolific fad for beach party movies, in which mysteriously parent-free teenagers meet on the shore to date and do nothing that threatens a U certificate while...

It's a story we keep running into here on Pop Screen: a band are so big, so acclaimed, that they think "We could make a film, how could that go wrong?" and the universe then demonstrates exactly how that could go wrong. Coming just one year after their worldwide smash The Joshua Tree, U2 decided to make Rattle & Hum, a documentary about their American tour. It earned them their first negative reviews, and caused people to reflect - for the first time, if you can believe it - that...

Vampires! Undead creatures of the night who people also find really hot! If you think fancying a walking corpse is #problematic, wait until you see the actions of Vampire, the imaginatively-named vampire played by Martin Kemp in 1995's Embrace of the Vampire. In Anne Goursaud's film, he's looking to get his fangs on an underage girl before she's legal, just like [NAME REDACTED ON LEGAL ADVICE] There are more tangents than usual on this episode, possibly so Graham and guest host Robyn Adams...

Pop Screen doesn't cover much metal, and a cynical listener might counter that we're not about to start now, as we look at the 2019 Netflix film The Dirt. A biopic of Motley Crue, it offers a visceral look at sex, drugs and rock and roll, but maybe not enough into why hair metal (the stuff Americans heretically call "glam rock") remains so divisive. To address this and so many other questions, Graham is joined by Kat from The Hollywood News to talk about their mutual soft spot for the...