The Phoenician Scheme

This time, we dive back into the revamped zombie franchise for the second instalment in the 28 Years Later series, The Bone Temple. Director Nia DeCosta picks up the series writer Alex Garland's post-apocalyptic tale and imbues it with a war documentary intensity that moves effortlessly between horror, joy and meditation on the nature and origin of evil.If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

Director Lynne Ramsay returns with another emotionally complex, dream-like film, "Die My Love", which already has critics utterly enraged and confounded. Fortunatly Ebba and Macon are here to guide you through this moving, richly crafted exploration of how relationships come apart when one person refuses to see another's suffering and their desperate gambits for love.If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

After a little break, Projector Pod is back. This time, Ebba and Macon talk, yet again, about a film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. This story of kidnapping and paranoia unfurls into a black comedy of errors that rails against the powers that be and corporate doublespeak. At the same time, however, it paints a portrait of how oppression and isolation poison any kind of resistance, even when the facts are on their side.   If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

Projector Pod fave, the director Paul Thomas Anderson, returns to the cinema screen with his Pynchonesque epic of collapsing revolutionaries, One Battle After Another. With a plot too twisty to explain, characters too real and surreal to describe, and a tone that resists simple labels, it is remarkable that this film works so well. Yet, it also makes sense that it feels like just the right movie for the moment. If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

This time, we talk about Danny Boyle's return to the zombie movie world in 28 Years Later. The film is a super rich and endlessly interesting expansion of the themes Boyles put together in his original 28 Days Later form 2002. But now, as the world has changed (not least in the films' UK setting), 28 Years Later is that rare thing: a zombie movie that has us asking endless questions about society, life and the meaning of it all.If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

This time on Projector Pod, we are talking about arthouse director Kelly Reichardt's latest film, The Mastermind. A 1970s period piece about an unemployed father's attempt to pull off an audacious and strangely specific art heist at the local gallery. It is a richly textured, slow, almost slapstick character study set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and fading dreams of the counterculture about the dangers of being the main character when you're not quite up to the task.If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

Ari Aster returns to our screens with a black slapstick comedy about the insanity and trauma of the COVID-19 lockdowns, with Eddington. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a down-on-his-luck small-town sheriff who is so disgruntled by the lockdowns that he decides to challenge the town's mayor for office. But what has been bubbling underneth for the sheriff is being brought to the surface by the weird world of social distancing and screens. Ebba and Macon talk about how Aster's movie about trauma a political division has a lot of serious stuff to say about our digital dystopia.

Wes Anderson returns to the silver screen with what some are controversially calling his most emotional film to date, The Phoenician Scheme. But what to make of this mid-century fetishising, reindeer lichen coloured, slapstick violence laden, god bothering caper? Is there more to this film than the zany characters and perfect framing?If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

Luca Guadagnino returns to the cinema following the roaring success of Challengers with an adaptation of William Burroughs' auto-fictional experimental novel of love in the age of intensely felt internalised homophobia, Queer. Beyond the film continuing the trend for gorgeously dirty white linen suits on film, Queer is a masterful, impressionistic exploration of living in bodies and with desires that are tangled up with socially shaped self-loathing and the loneliness that follows from fear. There is so much to unfold!If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here. 

Director Bong Joon Ho returns to Anglophone cinema with the satirical sci-fi Black comedy Mickey 17. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey, a down-on-his-luck earthling who tries to escape his trouble by signing up for a space voyage as an "expendable", i.e., a person who can die over and over again because they have his data on file. So, what does this tonally peculiar film have to say about the world we live in today?If you think Projector Pod is the kind of thing you'd like to support, you can find our Patreon here.