School of Movies

Mar 28 2025 472 ep. 122 mins 3.4k

School of Movies Podcast artwork

Super in-depth analysis of movies (and occasionally TV, and video games). Hosted by veteran podcasters Alex & Sharon Shaw with different guests for round-table chats every week. To get into our hundreds of previous episodes look for the School of Movies Archive and the School of Everything Else Archive. If you can’t find a show it will be on one of those.

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A Space for the Unbound

Mar 28 2025 102 mins

[School of Everything Else 2025] A charming 16-bit style indie adventure game, set in suburban Indonesia in the 1990s. This begins cosy, deliberately evoking the familiar, and swiftly becomes strange and mysterious with a story of loss and grief and loneliness at its core; an ache longing to be relieved. The gameplay involves exploring the town and getting to know the locals, jumpi

Crow Country

Mar 21 2025 105 mins

[School of Everything Else 2025] A marvellously authentic and creepy modern Survival Horror in the convincing style of a PlayStation One title from the mid-90s conversely featuring inflections of more contemporary scary games. This one is available on Steam and Switch and PS4 and Xbox Series X. There is an abandoned theme park to explore and mysteries to uncover, as we structure th

Resident Evil 4

Mar 14 2025 86 mins

[School of Everything Else 2025] One of the most beloved, instantly-transformative, replayed, re-released, and critically acclaimed games of all time... and would you believe until preparing for this show, that I wasn't massively fussed about it? But this year I have been replaying all of the original games sequentially, and after the first era of fixed-camera tank controls transit

The Music of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Vol. 2

Mar 07 2025 112 mins

[School of Everything Else 2025] All the way back in 2017 I put together an absolutely EPIC musical journey through the first eight years of the MCU, from Iron Man all the way up to Doctor Strange. So much time has passed since then (cue many gifs of Matt Damon drinking from the wrong Grail) and Marvel has not followed my sound advice about allowing each hero (and maybe a villain o

The Music of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Vol. 1

Mar 06 2025 178 mins

[School of Everything Else 2017] NOTE: This is an archival episode from many years ago. Recently the excellent YouTube series Every Frame a Painting asked members of the public if they could hum any of the music from the Marvel films. Unsurprisingly they couldn't come up with anything. There are a few reasons for this, that I go into on the show, but this presentation right here i

Summer 2025 Commissions Season

Mar 05 2025 3 mins

Hello there folks, this is your official notification that the School of Movies Summer Commissions season window is now open. And it’s a special case this time around. Originally this run was meant to pay for our second family vacation, the last one being back in 2017. We’re going to Italy. But the week after we booked it our landlord of nine years dropped the bomb on us that h

The Great Muppet Caper / Muppets Take Manhattan

Feb 28 2025 143 mins

[School of Movies 2025] The second and third parts of the original Trilogy of Muppet movies made while Jim Henson was alive, voicing Kermit and taking a heavily active role in production. The former from 1981 is a jewel heist that brings the anarchic furry ones to England, populated by only polite people (a trope which causes the two of us endless amusement) and very much concerns

Palm Springs

Feb 21 2025 96 mins

[School of Movies 2025] We round off Groundhog Month with a time loop movie that explores with even more depth how being stuck in a single day would effect a person's outlook on life, their philosophy and their actions. Taking its cue from the early script idea for what became the Bill Murray classic, we begin by observing a man named Niles, already locked in his time loop, from th

Happy Death Day

Feb 14 2025 97 mins

[School of Movies 2025] This is not a Horror movie (or rather, it qualifies enough for that genre in terms of certain expected tropes and elements, but that is not its mode of conduct, and for people expecting conventional Horror, there's a lot more there in its place). That's what should have been on the poster and promotional artwork, and in the trailers, and threaded through the

The Wizard of Oz

Feb 07 2025 110 mins

[School of Movies 2025] One of history's abiding classics, and one of the oldest films we have ever covered on this show, the 1939 Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland is joined here with several key points of comparison to establish why it really hold up. We've already recorded a whole episode on the dark, late sequel, Return to Oz (1985) though it does get mentioned here, as well a