Jules: Roman Polanski's least controversial film may be one of his densest when it comes to themes and messaging. Based upon a subplot of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel The Club Dumas, Polanski plays out a love affair with books, their physicality, and their mystery. Johnny Depp's muted Dean Corso encounters the gamut of Polanskian caricatures, from the mephistophelian Frank Langella, the vampish Lena Olin, and the angelic Emmanuelle Seigner.  David: Unlike the claustrophobic 'Rosemary's...

The inaugural episode of Overlooked SHORTS. Ironically focussing on one of the longest feature films in recent memory, Jules and David literally phone it in with a short commentary whilst not watching the movie. David recalls and Jules interrogates, surveying the technological innovations, the water, whales, wokeness and 3D wonders of Avatar: The Way of Water.

David: Each manifestation of Dune, including Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, can be viewed as a product of its time. Dune (2021) appears sanitised to accomodate the social and geopolitical tensions of the 21st Century. It’s also a different take on the huge weight of world-building detail in the novel and the choice whether to cram it into a movie or leave most of it out. Here we set out to cram some back in for you. Jules: Is the tragedy of DUNE (2021) the same as the tragedy of DUNE (1984),...

Jules: Do we deceive ourselves when we attempt to distinguish the sacred from the carnal? A small film made in a small village in a small (for Scandinavia) country seeks answers, as do we. David: When a fortress of encrusted ascetic piety and propriety suffers an unexpected incursion of fabulous french cuisine, something more than its inhabitants' impoverished taste buds cracks open. Rather than the conflict against which the god-fearing community steels itself, Babette's state-of-the-art...

David: The perenniality of the vampire genre derives from its capacity for reinvention. Its form mimics its content in similar fashion to the zombie genre, transcending death. Here, the immortality of Jarmusch’s vampire couple is a perfect foil for retrophile hipsterism. They are aficionados of a lapsed cutting edge – analog technologies, first edition guitars, a dash of Tesla tech for colour and in the garage is a perfectly-poised-between-eras XJS Jaguar. They disdain contemporary ephemera...

Film commentary track for Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

Jules: Is it possible to make a film about vampires that is not a vampire film? The genre is perennial, with familiar tropes that filmmakers endlessly adjust to achieve varied ends. Power, class struggle, sex, death, eternal life and eternal damnation; each theme intersects vividly across the genre. Neil Jordan seeks transcendence for his antiheronies, from their plight, and their genre within film, with some success. David: At the heart of many a vampire story sits the dramatic tension...

David: A black satire perhaps running overlong with other ideas. It presages a spate of dark, disillusioned and memorably bleak films from the following year 1969. What does this say about the realities of 1968? The swinging 60s was as dead as the Summer of Love and the young boomers came out of it a cynical lot. This telling of the famous doomed  British cavalry charge overviews the production of cannon fodder, from street  urchins to gold-buttoned mounties of imperial glory and, with one...

Jules & David commenteer on Frederico Fellini's contribution to the three-part Edgar Allen Poe adaptation from 1968.

Part Two of the Vadim-Malle-Fellini moral ménage à trois. David: Does the shadow have its own shadow? Does a remorseless psychopath have a suppressed or intermittent conscience, or none at all? What if they were one day confronted by one? Jules: One is accustomed to thinking of oneself as having a dark side; implying that one is essentially good. But what if one discovers that one is the shadow, repeatedly assailed by the light?

Part one of a 3-in-1 Poe anthology, baton passed between directors Vadim, Malle and Fellini. Jules: Are soulmates real, even if one or more of the parties behave soullessly? What is the price to save one's soul, once it it lost? Roger Vadim and his beautiful entourage seek answers beneath the surface of things. David: A tragic ghost myth? A seminal precursor to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? Or both plus a costume rehearsal for the immediately subsequent intramarital collaboration by Vadim and...

Jules: Whether or not machines can, should, or will become self-aware are perennial debates in the field of artificial intelligence. They are perfectly capable of performing any number of tasks without it, and it's unclear how one might go about installing or eliciting it in a machine. Peter Chung of Aeon Flux fame engages in these questions by way of the interaction between human agents with a killer machine that has been trapped in a virtual world.

Jules: If politics is theatre, and the public are the audience, and the affairs of the day are the script, who are the writers, and where do the actors come from? Can the actors perceive the truth they are playing a role in a work they have mistaken to be their own lives? What if they should?  David: Considered part of Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”, along with Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View is a reporter cum detective story surveying the creation of...

David: In this second part of our survey of the human condition, we move from HG Wells’ s 1930s to a voice from the 1990s with no words. Rather than an obvious narrative, Baraka paints a canvas, bringing into focus piece by piece an image that turns more and more of its facets to the light but doesn’t really progress. As if it were less a film than a mandala, a shrine or a temple, it could serve it's purpose equally well on an eternal loop with an audience free to come and go. Perhaps...

David: We embark on a two part examination of the human condition, beginning with the movie of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel of imagined future history. This modernist manifesto posits that humanity is distinguished from the animals by little more than ambition and the march of progress. There seems to be no alternative for us but onward, onward to the stars. Wells begins his fable with war, disaster and rebirth, perhaps meaning to describe the arc of civilsation from a fresh beginning, but also...

Jules: Sequel, prequel, reboot, or mashup? Or just the logical conclusion of director George Miller's deconstruction of genre, gender, and guzzlene? David: We bookend our survey of 1979's Mad Max1 with our overview of the latest 2015 instalment. On Fury Road there’s lot to recognise from our own time. Much of the human degradation in it's murdered world seems to be with us now, already.

David: As Mad Max returns to cinemas after 20 years in the wasteland we look back further to Mad Max’s origins, as well as contexts like seventies oil shocks, road death tolls, bikie gang terror in the media and a director moonlighting as a doctor in an emergency ward. Jules: The most financially successful budget genre film (until 1999's Blair Witch Project) or something more? What does director George Miller deconstruct as he assembles his mythos.

David: Science fiction has been crowded from our movie screens by a plethora of comic strip adaptation. Sunshine raised the flag for serious sci-fi cinema in a very lean decade. It recalls Kubrick’s 2001 in positing space as a spiritual destination, with the sun, the source and nurturer of life, not unlike a god to its hapless progeny, who are on a precarious mission to keep its dying light alive. In the end one of Sunshine’s revealed truths is that a film cannot transcend its script. Much...

Jules: Is there such a thing as essential human nature, or can we turn ourselves into whatever we think we ought to be, whenever and wherever it suits us? And if we can, are we still human? David: Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling must decide whether or not they (eachother) are literally to die for. Meanwhile a technical anomaly causes the Overlooked team to narrate the film with the second and third acts switched out of order. Hilarity doesn’t quite ensue but perhaps a revitalised...

David: An art movie, a drug movie, Nicolas Roeg’s directing debut, a Mick Jagger acting debut,  a late, post-swinging 60′s bohemian manifesto, but underpinning all that one of the best British gangster flicks around. It features a foulmouthed, thuggish, head kicking turn by the erstwhile toffee nosed James Fox as bovver-boy Chas, who comes in for some heavy deconstruction when, finding himself on the run, he chooses the dark cave of a retired rock-star recluse to lay low in. Not an atom of...

Jules: Louis Malle pre-empts Jean-Luc Godard’s advice about girls, guns, and movies, but also adds a stuck elevator, a forgotten grapnel, a shopgirl, a streetpunk, and a gull-wing Mercedes-Benz to the mix. We join Jeanne Moreau on her existential walk of shame as she waits for news from her special forces lover and his perfect plan to murder her wealthy husband. The ready-to-hand surroundings of late-Fifties Paris intersect in a kind of metaphysical perfection with the desolation of Miles...

David: Steve McQueen departs the sixties at high speed, driving for team Porsche. The Le Mans car race pushes the limits of endurance over a non-stop 24 hours as McQueen pushes the envelope of cool, shifting his schtick into the autistic spectrum uttering barely a word of dialogue for the first half hour and not much thereafter either. A racing manifesto and vérité documentary infused with the barest hint of plot somehow feels curiously innovative. Death hovers over the proceedings and the...

  Jules: Our commentary expands to include the small(er) screen in this episode, namely the stellar Æon Flux series of MTV short films from the 1990s. Are we all the self-deluding victims of deterministic circumstance, or can we freely choose between possible outcomes as truly moral agents? We examine the cases brought forward by arch-provocatrix Æon, dictator-for-life Trevor, and gonzo-comedian-psychopath Bambara.  David: We attempt to bring our rational thoughts to bear upon the...