Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn't have such an effect on us - even José found some things to compliment about it.

Perhaps it's the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it had been building for a decade, that makes Deadpool & Wolverine work as it otherwise might not - its jokes about the X-Men joining the MCU at a low point really landed, for example. It's far from perfect - Ryan Reynolds' schtick remains smug, and the film tries to have it both ways, delivering snarky commentary on the sorts of things films like this do, then discarding the snark when it wants to do them itself. But it's pacey, energetic, full of intense action with a delightfully cartoony attitude, filled with so many attempts to make you laugh that some of them are bound to work, and featuring a pair of enjoyable, charismatic villains: Matthew Macfadyen's Mr. Paradox is a marvellously hammy presence, while Emma Corrin's Cassandra Nova's slight physique and genteel demeanour make her telepathic abilities all the more threatening.

Recorded on 9th August 2024.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/04/18/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-diego-cepeda-on-outskirts/
I recently discovered the existence of a new and exciting film magazine: OUTSKIRTS. It’s in English, though mostly written by people for whom English is a second language or who don’t speak English at all: translation, in multiple senses, is an integral part of the magazine.  It’s a handsome physical object, originating in the Locarno Critics Academy but speaking a different film culture, off-centre, from the margins or the periphery. In this podcast I talk to one of the editors, Diego Cepeda (the others are Nathan Latoré, Sofie Cato Maas, Raymond Shik and Christopher small), with filmmaker/critic Felix Cordero Bello contributing illuminating contexts and asides.   
Near the beginning of the podcast Diego cites a poem by Farid Ud-din Attar,
‘The birds had departed towards a distant luminosity that attracted them.
Those who did not perish on the way would understand upon arrival that they had been transformed into that light that now attracted others’. 
OUTSKIRTS is a magazine that is itself, embodies, a romance of movies, film culture, film history, woven through with friendship. It aims to put at the centre marginalised filmmakers and film cultures; and asks its readers to slow down, look back, look deeply, and think. The launch of each issue is accompanied by live events, often including readings and screenings. Diego cites Abraham Polonsky at the end, ‘The only fights worth fighting are for lost causes’.
Speaking to Diego and Felix, in English, a second language for them,  a whole cinema culture comes alive. They cite LA VIDA UTIL and Lucía Salas as an inspiration: a spirit of sharing knowledge, friendship and dialogue, enthusiasm for cinema, a similar way of thinking about film history. Diego and Felix both also write for Simulacro magazine edited by Julia Scrive-Loyer (https://www.simulacromag.com/) participate in its weekly cine-club and are connected to the Chavón School of Film and Design, itself associated with Parsons, with Diego as one of its key lecturers. ‘How can we approach the history of images and sounds from a place that maybe didn’t have (a film industry) but we have to create tools for understanding those elements that did exist (newsreels, home movies, a rich culture of filmgoing)’, says Diego.

The conversation ranges from the origins of the magazine, it’s aims (to defend cinema from this place, that is on the margins), it’s focus (to shine a light on the overlooked), how each issues tries to create a thread of thought. We detour through a brief account of a history of cinema in the Dominican Republic, where the conversation took place. All this and much more can be listened to in the podcast below:

The new issue comes out in June and can be purchased at: https://outskirtsmag.com/

José Arroyo in Conversation with Diego Cepeda on OUTSKIRTS

What a joy! We were delighted to be invited to the University of Warwick Film and Television Studies department for a conversation with James MacDowell about Eavesdropping at the Movies: how it began, why we do it, what we get out of it, how we make it. We hope you enjoy what was an enormously satisfying hour and a bit in which we had the privilege to discuss our practice of film criticism with an audience keen to ask questions. Thank you to James for chairing and to Julie Lobalzo Wright for inviting us.

Recorded on 29th April 2025.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: In Conversation at the University of Warwick

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is a horror musical set in 1930s Mississippi, shot in part on IMAX 70mm film, starring Michael B. Jordan as a pair of identical twins who return to their hometown for a new start, only to encounter vampires. It's as ambitious as that sounds and full of ideas and culturally specific nuance, and José loves it. Mike doesn't.

We discuss how the music draws on several influences, not just from the blues of the era but also from Irish folk and hip-hop; the getting-the-band-back-together feel of the opening, in which the twins bring their influence and riches to bear on the creation of the juke joint; the visual design, simultaneously confident and careless; the crowd-pleasing fantasy of an anti-racist Rambo; and the theme of vampirism - what it means and how it's used.

Recorded on 5th May 2025.

442 - Sinners

The slasher series without a slasher returns for its sixth instalment, fourteen years after we last saw it. Where Halloween gave us Michael Myers, Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, Final Destination made death the villain - perhaps more accurately, Death, but we never see a cloaked man wielding a scythe. Where the figure of the slasher killer could, in principle, be evaded and even beaten, Final Destination's Death, non-corporeal and omnipresent, carries a key threat of inevitability. Nobody escapes Death.

In each Final Destination film, one character's premonition of catastrophe gives them the chance to save themselves and others from death, but Death won't take being cheated lying down, and sets its sights on pursuing its near-victims to the graves they're currently avoiding. How? Through elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque accidents, of course. We discuss the ways in which Final Destination Bloodlines' set pieces work, how they focus on small moments and individual stories, and how they're a nightmare for the naturally anxious. José isn't shy of expressing his dislike of the film; Mike, the opposite, and he does his best to explain the appeal of watching so many people perish in such gruesome ways. We even ask whether a slasher series could be made with which José would see eye to eye, and imagine what it might look like.

Recorded on 20th May 2025.

443 - Final Destination Bloodlines

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/25/one-second-zhang-yimou-2020/
Zhang Yimou’s very beautiful film has things to say about the cultural revolution and Chinese History and other things we’re not best placed to discuss. However, it is also about cinema: it’s lure, it’s power, its enchantments and  its fragility; and Zhang Yimou’s magisterial mise-en-scène embodies its themes through its medium as if in the process of unfurling from an editing sweet, to a projector and onto a screen.

Thinking Aloud About Film: One Second (Zhang Yimou, 2020)

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/30/thinking-aloud-about-film-le-jour-se-leve-marcel-carne-1939/
We discuss Marcel Carné's superb Daybreak/ Le  Jour se lève, which we saw at the Garden Cinema as part of their wonderful Film Noir International programme. 
In the podcast we discuss the film as an example of ‘Poetic Realism’; as one of the first films to be described as a ‘film noir’; as an expression of the Popular Front sentiment and how the film’s reception aligned with reviewers’ political views. In relation to the film, we discuss the significance of its structure, the precision of the decor and mise-se-en-scène where it seems every object in François room subsequently comes into play to describe loss, longing, love, innocence since tarnished.  I have made a compilation of all the times Gabin looks out the bullet-riddled window and outside. As the day rises and the night ends so does François’ life. We discuss Gabin, Arletty, Jules Berry…all at their best. Gabin is the representative everyman with nothing to live for but more sand in his lungs. It’s not only that as Georges Altman writes, ‘the whole of the working class is etched in Gabin’s face’ it’s that Gabin’s IS the face of the whole of the French working classes. He is François,. She is Françoise. Together they represent the oppression of the French working class. They are everyman and everywoman, orphaned by capitalism. This is a film not only about doomed love but a protest against class-as-destiny, one of the film’s most worked-through themes.

Thinking Aloud About Film: Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)

A wide-ranging discussion follows the release of the final Mission: Impossible film... perhaps. José doesn't believe that they'll stop making them, nor does he want them to, but he is glad that Tom Cruise appears to be hanging up his boots - he's just too old now. While he reflects on Cruise's career and stardom, Mike's watched every Mission: Impossible film in anticipation of The Final Reckoning, and tracks changes in their aesthetics, sexuality, and comic tone, as the series worked its way towards finding the formula that's become its signature.

Recorded on 27th May 2025.

444 - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

In the 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl infamously directed two propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, for the Nazi Party. For the rest of her life, which ended in 2003, she denied knowledge of the regime's crimes, including the Holocaust. In 2016, her heirs gave her estate, which included a vast collection of personal documents, correspondence, and film and tape recordings, to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which itself gave permission to Sandra Maischberger and Andres Veiel, a journalist and filmmaker respectively, to use the material as the basis of a documentary. Riefenstahl, comprising countless elements of the archive, along with documents from other sources, builds a biography of a person who never came clean about what she knew about Nazi Germany, and never took responsibility for her part in it.

It's a complex and layered examination of a life led between pride and denial, and has resonances today: take Riefenstahl's television appearance in 1976 alongside Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist and contemporary who refuses to believe her claims of ignorance during wartime, which is followed by recordings of phone calls to Riefenstahl in support of her stance and contempt for Kretschmer. The line between those calls and the metastasising popularity of extreme right-wing, "anti-woke" and similar ideologies today is self-evident, as is the difference between ideas expressed publicly and privately. Riefenstahl is more outspoken off the record than on it, demanding interviewers' cameras be turned off to prevent them from capturing candid revelations. In this sense and others, her life provides a window into fascism - what drives it - her initial response to seeing and hearing Adolf Hitler speak is almost sexual - what it represents and offers to its adherents, and how it shrinks and cowers when it doesn't get everything it wants.

It's a problem for Mike that the film doesn't seem to think that the artistic and cultural impact of Riefenstahl's work is worth exploring, where to him it's the most interesting thing about her. Not only were her films technically and artictically innovative - something claimed by subjects in the film but not explained or examined - but her work arguably gives the Nazis their key, and enduring, victory. As thuggish and vile as the regime was, and despite its collapse, through Triumph of the Will and Olympia it created an image of itself as glorious and powerful with which we continue to associate it, and to which neo-Nazis today aspire to emulate. Few filmmakers have left a cultural legacy of such significance and duration, but the documentary isn't interested in the work - only the person.

Quibbles apart, Riefenstahl is an excellent example of how to tell a complex tale with intention, clarity, and concision, while allowing for interpretation of the material presented, and it'll be the basis of endless conversations. Highly recommended.

Recorded on 2nd June 2025.

445 - Riefenstahl

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/06/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-james-taylor-on-the-superhero-blockbuster-adaptation-style-and-meaning/
Just as the Superhero film loses centrality in the culture there comes a book that is not only a brilliant accounting of the various strategies of adaptations the mode engages with but also offers a methodology that will be of interest and use to anyone engaged with the analysis of visual media:  not only a brilliant book, but an important one. In this podcast we talk about what it is that is being adapted when discussing comic book characters that have so many iterations across different media. We talk about modes of seriality; the translation of the illusion of movement across media; the significance of bodies in spaces and movement in the mode; intertextuality, kaleidoscopic irruptions; how the move to digital affected issues of realism and reflexivity; restorative and reflective nostalgia; how the works compress, hierarchize and create continuities; the dramatization of alternate timelines….and we return over and over again to the hierarchization of gendered, racialised and sexualised bodies in dialogue with past iterations, current politics, contemporary formal strategies and more. I can't imagine future explorations of audiovisual work engaged with adapting any form of Intellectual Property, characters or worlds uninformed by THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING.

JAMES TAYLOR on THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/12/thinking-aloud-about-film-arrebato-ivan-zulueta-1979/
A cult film; a queer film; a vampire film; a film maudit; a film about film; a film about drugs; a film about film as a drug;  a film that deserves to be better known. Audiences will recognise many of Almodóvar’s collaborators from his earliest works (Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, Luis Ciges, Will More; Ángel Luis Fernádez is the dop) and the voice of Almódovar himself. A genre film that transforms into an auteur film. A film of the Movida and a film of the transition. A film that embodies and evokes one era but that gained traction in another. A cinephile’s film about addiction where one delights in being bitten by drugs and cinema even as that bite becomes transformative and potentially deadly. An avant-garde experiment encased in a genre film. A trawl through the underground that aimed at the mainstream. A film to see and discuss.

Thinking Aloud About Film: (Arrebato, Iván Zulueta, 1979)

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo.

"I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

Eavesdropping at the Movies

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