Return to Form

Mar 04 2024 95 ep. 54 mins 171

Return to Form Podcast artwork

FKA Muub Tube - Ralph and Owen bring the film form into focus.

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Why are British Films so bad?

Mar 04 2024 125 mins

In this episode, Ralph and Owen journey into the spectral wastes of British film, asking: what went wrong, and what is to be done? Through kitchen sink realism, folk-horror spooks, socially-engaged documentarians, materially-inclined avant-gardism, and more than a handful of oddballs, the situation seems as underwhelming as it was in 1927, when Kenneth Macpherson opined that “it

Maestro & Suzhou River - two movies we liked!

Jan 09 2024 61 mins

This week, we’re slipping into the proverbial cinematic pool with a brief pitstop in Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein-biopic Maestro and a longer look at a luscious new restoration of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). We also figure out what it means to be ‘Shanghaied’.

Film is so back! The Best of 2023

Dec 18 2023 67 mins

In a year when so much felt so over, film seems so beautifully back. Casting their eyes over twelve months, four festivals, and countless hours of chthonic kino encounters, the boys sat down to boil the broth of 2023; setting out to identify their top 10 films of the year. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6hdAjXtGPpeQTCcuJ3KNmH?si=Ud_f__90TOSa28tzYPA5GQ Listen on

Eustache - it's the way he tells 'em!

Dec 03 2023 66 mins

Jean Eustache is hard to pin down. A French auteur who combined the brevity of Bresson with the romantic rambling of Rohmer. Eustache often preferred telling to showing. Yet somehow these moments of gossip and reminiscence are powerfully cinematic. A spell is cast with judicious editing, subtle performances and gentle fades to black. After a short break the boys return to send ne

BFI London film Festival Report #3

Oct 17 2023 131 mins

LFF may be over, but the takes are not. For their final derive through the halls of contemporary arthouse film, Ralph, Owen, and George take stock of flicks both fair and foul: Jonathan Glazer’s tautly rigorous Zone of Interest, Molly Manning Walker’s spring-breaky debut How to Have Sex, Moin Hussain’s service station sci-fi Sky Peals, Wim Wender’s flabby kunstlerfilm Ansel

BFI London film Festival Report #2

Oct 09 2023 149 mins

Battered and broken, their eyes barely staying open, Ralph and Owen are joined by Berlin correspondent George MacBeth for a second heaving helping of LFF. The stakes are high, covering the likes of Radu Jude’s towering DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH OF THE END OF THE WORLD, Steve McQueen’s uneven symphony of OCCUPIED CITY, Mortezai’s unexpectedly bracing EUROPA, Scorcese’s *shruggi

BFI London film Festival Report #1

Oct 04 2023 84 mins

Un-reel city, under the brown fog of winter (well, autumn) dawn – a crowd flowed over Picadilly Circus, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Apologies to T.S. Eliot, but London Film Festival 2023 has landed – banging the slush from its shoes, clapping its hands together, and inviting us to step inside the cheugy rooms of Picturehouse bloody Central for two weeks

Why you're watching the wrong Christian Petzold films

Sep 05 2023 84 mins

Plumbing the murky and anodyne depths of German modernity, Christian Petzold – leading light of the Berlin School; protege of artist-filmmaker Harun Farocki – has a bafflingly uneven reputation. The highs are thrilling and poised; the lows, schlocky and off-note. Why so inconsistent? To separate the sauer from the succulent, the boys – joined by George MacBeth – set out on

Edward Yang: Family, brutality and modernity

Aug 19 2023 78 mins

Owen and Ralph discuss Edward Yang - the golden boy of the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang rose to fame with elliptical films like Taipei Story and The Terrorisers - which depicted intimate relationships, strained by modernity and Taiwain’s unique east/west ambivalence. His dense period piece A Brighter Summer Day established a fascination with family dynamics, which he pushed further w

We went to BFI Film On Film Festival!

Jun 14 2023 76 mins

Last weekend we dreamed in celluloid, in three-strip technicolor and, crucially, on NITRATE. The BFI's new, hopefully regular, festival dedicated to cinema's technical heritage was a triumph - give or take an opening night. The boys sampled some exhilarating expanded cinema on 16mm by Malcolm Le Grice, some dicy nostalgism from Mark Jenkin, and of course Blood and Sand, Rou