To coincide with the UK cinema release, Neil talks to director Rachel Lambert about Sometimes I Think About Dying, her third feature film. The conversation covers making a feature that had a successful life as a short film, the artistic and thematic legacies of COVID, the importance of location and place, the all-too-human desire to be seen and the terror that comes with that, the importance of Buster Keaton and the genius of Punch Drunk Love, among many other things in a deep and...

The new episode of the podcast sees Alison Peirse, now Professor of Film Studies at University of Leeds, return to the show to update us on her work in videographic scholarship and Global Women's Horror Film studies. The episode follows the recent release of a stunning special issue of the vital MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture Journal, edited by Alison, featuring a trove of video essays looking at the role of women in Global Horror filmmaking, which serves as an output of a larger-funded...

For the latest episode of the podcast Neil talks to filmmaker and academic Dr Nariman Massoumi about his wonderful short documentary Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (2023).  MUBI: In 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company set out to produce a publicity film promoting its activities in Iran. They hired the poet Dylan Thomas. This poetic film follows Thomas’s journey capturing his encounter with the country and its people as a political upheaval for oil nationalization unfolds. The film is not...

In the first episode of season 19 Neil takes the reins solo, with Dario on sabbatical, for a conversation with one of the UK’s leading filmmakers Jeanie Finlay, ahead of her popular and powerful new documentary Your Fat Friend, released in UK cinemas on Feb 9, 2024. Jeanie returns to the podcast having recorded a live conversation about her career to date and previous release, Seahorse (2019), at the film festival Neil co-directed in Luton, Filmstock. This conversation is wide-ranging. It...

In this final episode of 2023 (and season 18), we (Neil and Dario) ruminate on a year spent thinking cinematically and engaging with cinema in the unique way that has become the hallmark of The Cinematologists; thoughtful, personal, searching for meaning and meaningful experiences across the movie spectrum. We both share brief discussions of two films that stuck with us from different points of the year, Neil talking about Mark Jenkin’s short A Dog Called Discord and Christine Molloy and Joe...

In this episode of the Cinematologists podcast, we reflect on the pervasive apathy often accompanying the endless influx of new releases and how to combat nagging sense of FOMO which, at times, feels like it can never be satiated. When both of us saw Napoleon and agreed there wasn't much we wanted to talk about, and neither did a raft of art-house films on the various streaming platforms particularly get our juices flowing, we decided to unpack this troubling lassitude. Does the need to be...

In this special bonus, to tide you over before we are back with full, regular episodes in the run-up to year's end, Neil talks to filmmaker Toby Amies about his stunning music film In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50.  The conversation coincides with the film's release on streaming platforms following a critically lauded festival and cinema run. Thanks to Toby for taking the time to talk to us. Elsewhere Neil recommends John Akomfrah's incredible new film (installation)...

Our own Prof. Neil Fox in his day job is director of Falmouth University's Sound/Cinema Lab, which is behind films such as Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) and Chris Morris' A Year in a Field (2022) as well as Wilderness (2017), which Neil wrote and produced. Wilderness was also made with a student crew and was proof of concept for making a feature drama within the structure of a university course. With Dario delivering a module to second-year students called Professional Life Practice, designed...

A special for cinephiles and podphiles this week as we welcome the superb critic and broadcaster Rico Gagliano. Rico's official title is the Head of Audio at Mubi but it's his creative direction and voice that is the driving force of The Mubi Podcast. Indeed, the notion of creative auteurism is just one of the many topics covered in the in-depth conversation with Dario. We discuss a little of his background – his cinephile origin story – becoming a critic and moving into radio - his role at...

No matter the status of cinema, films focused on Hollywood icons seem to always retain a healthy level of interest. A key question is: do they bring anything new to the understanding of a storied figure. Stephen Kijak the director of Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed, released on UK streaming this week, embarks on a sweeping ambitious, and intimate portrayal of a star whose symbolism transcended, albeit unintentionally, the silver screen. From B-Movie matinees through to the ultimate...

In the first of a special (our first ever) double header, Neil and Dario discuss new Irish comedy road movie Apocalypse Clown. As it debuts on Netflix following a short cinema run, Neil talks to 'friend of the pod', producer James Dean about his collaboration with the team behind the project, comedy music troupe Dead Cat Bounce, the project's gestation and journey to the screen and the place of comedy in film culture and cinephilia.  This is picked up by Dario and Neil who wrestle with the...

In this episode, Neil and Dario go deep on a couple of favourite titles each from this year's excellent London Film Festival. Neil eulogises Pat Collins' That They May Face The Rising Sun and Shujun Wei's Only The River Flows, while Dario waxes lyrical on Hirokazu Koreeda's Monster and Tran Anh Hung's The Taste of Things.  Elsewhere they briefly discuss some of their honourable mentions including Catherine Breillat's Last Summer and Moin Hussain's Sky Peals. Neil also mentions a not so...

We’re back for season 18 and we’re kicking off with an in-depth look at new feature documentary A Year in a Field, a quiet film by Christopher Morris that is currently on tour around UK cinemas, distributed by Anti-Worlds. Produced by Bosena (Enys Men) in partnership with Stone Club and Falmouth University’s Sound/Image Cinema Lab, the film tells the story of Chris’s relationship with a 4,000 year old menhir (standing stone) in West Penwith, Kernow, and the slow burn political awakening...

For our final episode of season 17, before we go on our summer hiatus, we lean into cinematic pleasure. Provoked by both of us admitting some recent struggles with the relentlessness of film culture, the seeming tyranny of "so much stuff" and the some of the less edifying aspects of film discourse, we think through the hierarchies that are often attached to certain types of pleasure. Dario quotes from an academic article by Rutsky and Wyatt - Serious Pleasures: Cinematic Pleasure and the...

In May 2023, Laura Mulvey and Rod Stoneman returned to Falmouth 45 years following a weekend of Independent Film and Sexual Politics to reconvene a dialogue about politics, experimental film, cinematic form and radicalism. The event, Falmouth Film Weekend [1978 Revisited], was hosted by Falmouth University’s Sound/Image Cinema Lab, and was delivered by Neil, in consort with staff and student colleagues. The weekend was a mix of screenings, seminars and talks, the latter by Laura and...

In association with Dead Good Film Club and Death Futures [DORS#6]) In this episode, Neil accepts an invitation from Newcastle's Dead Good Film Club and the Death Online Research Network (DORN) to host a Q&A on the Japanese film Plan 75 (2022). The panel brought together religious and humanist celebrants, death educators and palliative care specialists as part of the 6th Death Online Research Symposium held at Northumbria University, tilted 'Death Futures'. The screening was hosted at the...

In this episode Neil and Dario discuss two fairly recent films that were both prize winners at Cannes 2022: Lukas Dhont's Close and Hlynur Pálmason's Godland. In terms of setting and story the films seem very different, however there is connecting tissue in the ways that the social fabric in each film defines the experience of the male characters, their sense of self, relation to others and the world. It's this context that provides a jumping off point for a wide ranging conversation that...

In this special audio documentary episode of The Cinematologists Podcast, we draw upon the fascinating research in an AHRC funded project Demons of the Mind: Psychiatry and Cinema in the long 1960s. Exploring the complex interrelations between cinema and the psy-sciences during a unique period of material collaboration, we cover the dimensions of mutual influence between filmmakers and psychiatric professions in a number of contexts - the depiction of psychological themes in case history...

Neil and Dario dedicate an episode to discussing the work of the brilliant French filmmaker Alice Diop, using the release of her debut fiction feature Saint Omer as a jumping off point into her incredible body of work. Their conversation takes in some of her documentary work, On Call (2016), Towards Tenderness (2016) and We (2021), all of which, along with Saint Omer, are available to stream on MUBI in the UK currently. The conversation covers a variety of topics but all respond to Diop's...

Brett (writer/director/editor) and Simon (producer) Harvey, are stalwarts of contemporary Cornish cinema and 2022 saw the release of their third feature film Long Way Back, which has just hit streaming platforms.  Supported by Falmouth University's Sound/Image Cinema Lab, which has also supported the work of Mark Jenkin and for which Neil is the research and strategy lead, Long Way Back marks a departure in style and ambition for the filmmaking brothers and their company o-region. Neil talks...

This is a very special episode where we were invited, by friend of the podcast So Mayer to discuss a new film screening series and project. In 2022 and 2023, a series of trans-focused film events took place across the UK as part of Inclusive Cinema’s T.L.C (aka Tender Loving Care for Trans-Led/Trans-Loved Cinema) project.  Integrated into indie cinema and festival programmes, films were screened with Q&As and panels on diverse topics related to trans visibility in cinema, thanks to...

Just a quick trailer for our Berlinale Dispatches minisodes which you can listen to Dario's daily missives from the festival, over at our Patreon feed: https://www.patreon.com/cinematologists.  

In this episode, Neil talks with husband and wife filmmaking team Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum about their new work Husband, a follow-up to 2016's meta-documentary-autofiction-comedy The New Man. Josh and Devorah are co-directors and appear in the film as versions of themselves navigating marriage, parenthood, work and a New York tour for Devorah's latest book. The conversation covers their unique approach to marriage and moviemaking, comedy, collaboration and feelings. It's a...

For this episode, Neil and Dario dive back into the work of master Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa having last talked about his cinema in the earliest days of the podcast when they screened Yojimbo for an audience in Falmouth. The occasion for this revisit is a new, extensive retrospective of his work hosted at the BFI Southbank (and some regional partner cinemas) and on their BFI Player platform. The season is curated by filmmaker Asif Kapadia and writer Ian Hayden Smith, who Dario talked...