The Cinematologists Podcast

Welcome, friends.I have to admit that I’ve experienced a questionable amount of pleasure in researching for this latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. When I say “research”, I basically mean that every evening for the past two weeks I’ve been guiltlessly revelling in the violence, glamour and moral ambiguity of the cinema’s greatest hitmen (and women), assassins, and lone killers.It’s the question of these pleasures - of watching such characters move silently through the modern milieu we share: restaurants, banks, hotels, airports - and of their status as avatars for the commodity fetishism we’re socialised to desire, whether it’s clothes, cars, exotic locations or, indeed, guns, that we take as the starting point.These pleasures are aesthetic, to be sure, and a core line of our conversation explores the visual and sonic mechanisms filmmakers use to make the lone killer look impossibly cool.But on a deeper level, there are myriad symbolic pleasures to unpack, primarily derived from the assassin’s fundamental essence as a professional arbiter of death. By “symbolic pleasures” I mean the fantasies we get to borrow and try on at a safe distance. Cinema has always trafficked in these kinds of projected desires and anxieties, that’s what genres, stars and archetypes are for. But the lone killer amplifies this function, condensing into a single figure our contradictory longing for total freedom and autonomy, yet within the familiar framework of modernist culture, politics, and economics.We outline the dimensions of these symbolic pleasures. Total agency without negotiation or compromise, for instance. The killer embodies absolute decision-making and self-determination. In a culture of soft coercions, bureaucracy, b******t meetings, and interminable incompetence, the killer taps into a dark form of detached liberation. Although this notion is itself confounded to comic effect in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly (2012).The lone killer also exudes the romance of the outsider. The shadowy loner, an anti-citizen manipulating the system from the margins, carries a sense of mystery that endures, particularly in a time when sharing every aspect of our lives has become something of a default performative practice. Indeed, it’s fascinating to consider the lone killer as a symbol of alienation. They’re what a certain kind of loneliness looks like when it becomes active rather than depressive: isolation turned into method, detachment honed into a way of being in the world.For some killers, sexual desire is absolutely central to the mythos. Bond is the clearest prototype here, because scholarship has long framed him as a figure where violence is packaged with aspirational consumption and sexual charisma, all intertwined. And then there’s the sexual charge, which often isn’t “romance” so much as mobility: sex as another form of non-attachment, a proof that the killer can pass through bodies and spaces without being pinned down by them. Yet Bond films (and to an extent the character himself) have been read through a queer lens – breaking down the heteromasculine fantasy the films seem to promote (an aspect we discuss in some depth on this episode of the podcast: License to Queer).The real hook, though, is the fantasy of having no responsibilities to other humans. Or, more accurately, the fantasy of choosing your responsibilities. These protagonists often keep one small “human” attachment in a sealed container while everyone else becomes abstraction: targets, obstacles, and collateral damage. That compartmentalisation is the emotional technology that allows the lifestyle to function.Sexuality reads differently, of course, when the lone killer is a woman. The adoption of the femme fatale persona becomes both a weapon and a trap: seduction as tactical performance, but also as a ready-made framework through which her violence is contained, coded and often punished. The female lone killer frequently has to navigate the double bind of being hyper-visible as an object of desire while trying to claim the same cool detachment and professional focus afforded to her male counterparts.Then there’s competence as seduction. So many of these films function as “craft porn”: extended sequences of planning, surveillance, weapon prep, logistics, timing. We’re invited to admire mastery long before we’re asked to consider the consequences. That emphasis on hyper-competence often feeds into another recurring strand of lone-killer characterisation: a kind of obsessive, compulsive pathology. There is frequently an implicit, and sometimes explicit, suggestion that the killer is an outsider not just because of what they do, but because of how they are wired – uncomfortable with ordinary social interaction, more at home with systems and routines than with people. Being “out of sync” with the social world is then reframed as the superpower that underwrites their cold precision and attention to detail. It’s a trope that, to put it mildly, comes with its own problems around how neurodivergence and emotional detachment are conflated and aestheticised.Perhaps most importantly of all, though, the hitman/assassin symbolises the pleasure of circumventing – even actively challenging – the contradictions of the moral frameworks we’re all supposedly compelled by. On one level, it’s straightforward: breaking the laws of modern society to “get the job done” is stylised into an art form. But for many of these characters, especially those who aren’t simply nihilistic or coldly driven by money, there’s also a kind of ersatz morality at play. They possess a code, an ethos that operates as a moral alibi. Their relativist ethics become a way to expose the contingency, compromise, and hypocrisy of our broader systems of justice and citizenship. In watching them, we get to flirt with the fantasy of stepping outside that contradiction altogether.dariollinares.substack.comwww.cinematologists.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.comWelcome FriendsA bonus release this one, for my paying subscribers. I’m currently slammed with back-to-back student tutorials, 9–5, all week long, so new writing is taking a brief hiatus.My drafts folder seems to project a raised-eyebrowed expectancy, with several pieces sitting there in various states of completion. I have a piece on Bertrand Bonello’s

In the second in our early season doubleheader, we present a live Q&A from the Duke of York's Picturehouse in Brighton with Dario talking to the director of American Animals Bart Layton. The discussion touches on the amalgamations of fictional and documentary aesthetics (linked also to Bart's previous Bafta award-winning film The Imposter, the development of a script that changes over time, actors playing real-life characters who also appear in the film, and the current social and political climate as a backdrop for stories about white masculinity.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome friends.As always, our final episode of a calendar year is a look back at our cinematic highlights, structured around Neil’s and my top ten films lists. We always try to put this in something of a broader context, suggesting the always subjective criteria of judgement that go into our selections and the sense of incompleteness, compromise and general fallibility of ranking one’s artistic pleasure and admiration. But Neil is right when he comments on the show that lists are a way of organising thought amid the incessant noise of cultural overload.That question of structure becomes a recurring preoccupation across the conversation. Neil mentions that, when assembling his ten, he found himself instinctively pairing films; spotting “cousins” that echo each other in tone, narrative, or thematic focus.This is something of a recognition that cinematic appreciation often works through a clustering: films that don’t merely share “topics” (capitalism, community, violence, grief), but share strategies for coping with a world that increasingly refuses coherence.For me, an undeniable feature of 2025 in cinema has been the many narratives that reflect a feeling of senselessness—stories that don’t “resolve” so much as metabolise disorder. We keep circling filmmakers who can register the insanity of the present without converting it into a tidy thesis. Radu Jude is the obvious touchstone here: we talk about how his filmmaking avoids the temptation of big declarative statements, holding sincerity and cynicism, humour and despair, in the same hand.Kontinental 25, as much as any other film this year, explores the granular experience of politics as a kind of moral nausea, digital immediacy of its form aping the doom-scroll logic of being pulled from one sickening little story to the next.We keep returning to the sense that many “state of the nation” films this year (especially in the American context) operated as overt statements—almost insistently discursive—while, at the same time, we explored quieter, more contemplative works that approached personal and social crisis through subtler uses of form, tone, and time.Many films this year, implicitly and explicitly, explored the tensions of capitalism as a kind of lived texture: bureaucracy, managerialism, the violence of systems that call themselves neutral. From the handheld realism of Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine) right through to the expansive mythos and genre pleasures of Sinners (Ryan Coogler), the political economy of history and identity becomes a driving force.Indeed, Neil looks beyond the reductive “folk horror” label attached to Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, reading it instead as a study of collective life, of a community’s ethical capacity being tested by difference. Yet, in the end, capitalism arrives not as an abstract system but as an administrative colonisation that annihilates any sense of physical and cultural grounding.Political critique, meanwhile, was often built into formal aesthetics and narrative structure, delivered through inventive reworkings of familiar genres. Sinners, along with Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, were, of course, operating within the métier of horror. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk (the only film in my top ten I didn’t see at the cinema) is a brutal, unrelenting take on the speculative-dystopian trope of lethal competition, one that reads as a symbolic portrait of social psychopathy.Alongside these political currents sits another, quieter one: the insistence that time, how it’s felt, withheld, folded, or weaponised, might be cinema’s most underappreciated tool. Neil’s mini-rant about people calling Reichardt “slow” is really about the poverty of contemporary attention. The film knows it’s slow; it’s inviting you to spend time, to register the “felt time” of what happened before the film even begins. Elsewhere, we keep noticing films that structure revelation itself as an ethical question: when do we learn things, and how do we learn them?It’s why Nickel Boys becomes such a touchstone film for me, one that is criminally under-discussed. RaMell Ross’s attunement to memory and subjectivity, rather than objective historical biography, is realised through an innovative use of the POV shot—retooling it as an “aesthetics of alignment with empathy,” an apparatus through which we’re offered a multi-layered window into psycho-social trauma.I don’t want to reveal all the films we discuss—particularly our top choices—which, if you’ve followed The Cinematologists podcast, might strike you as paradoxically both as you might expect and somewhat contrary to expectations.At the end of the show, we spend a little time reflecting on The Cinematologists. We talk about the show’s ten-year run as a fitting “bracketing,” and hope it stands as a testament to a valuable, collaborative body of work. We discuss the different stages of the podcast, how it has evolved over time, and why, for various reasons in our work and personal lives, this feels like the right moment to stop.We’re no longer “young academics,” no longer driven by the same imperative to fill a gap in the culture. And we’ve always said that if the podcast ever became a chore—or, worse, if it looked like it might compromise our friendship—it would be time to draw things to a close.For me, I know I’ll reflect more in depth, in time, on what The Cinematologists has meant: the defining anchor of my cultural life, and a way of orienting my thoughts around the artform I love. I do need a little space, though, to adequately reckon with how much I’ve gained, the hard and soft skills that have made me a better writer, speaker, and thinker. Most importantly, producing the show with Neil for over a decade has taught me so much about the nature of collaboration, a commitment to practice, and what it means to be a friend.And, of course, thank you so much to everyone who has listened and come with us on this journey._____For the full Cinematologists archive, head to: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/the-cinematologists-newsletter-archiveFor more bonus content: www.patreon.com/cinematologists_____Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

The final regular episode of the podcast, not just for the season, but yes, for good, is a doozy. Writer Violet Lucca returns to the podcast for the first time since 2017 and for her first full, solo conversation, to discuss her incredible book on David Cronenberg, Clinical Trials (2024, Abrams). I talk to Violet about her process of writing the book, wit in criticism, sex and identity, and the politics of the time the films were made and what they say now, the emotional impact of rewatching films and the transformative power of writing about cinema, amongst other topics. And of course we explore specific titles in the Cronenburg filmography, in particular Crash (1996), Existenz (1999) and his most recent release The Shrouds (2024).After my conversation with Violet, we delve into the complexities of Cronenberg’s work, particularly regarding sexuality and identity, and wrap up with a few thoughts looking ahead to the final episode of the pod.Other topics in the episode include reflections on the writing of year-end film lists ahead of our final, upcoming episode, the importance of micro cinemas to film exhibition culture, and highlight former guest Pat Kelman’s crowdfunding campaign to aid film distribution in Cornwall, and for Cornish filmmakers in particular. Following (NF)———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologistsFor the full podcast archive: https://dariollinares.substack.com/s/the-cinematologists-newsletter-archive———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome, friends.I have to admit that I’ve experienced a questionable amount of pleasure in researching for this latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. When I say “research”, I basically mean that every evening for the past two weeks I’ve been guiltlessly revelling in the violence, glamour and moral ambiguity of the cinema’s greatest hitmen (and women), assassins, and lone killers.It’s the question of these pleasures - of watching such characters move silently through the modern milieu we share: restaurants, banks, hotels, airports - and of their status as avatars for the commodity fetishism we’re socialised to desire, whether it’s clothes, cars, exotic locations or, indeed, guns, that we take as the starting point.These pleasures are aesthetic, to be sure, and a core line of our conversation explores the visual and sonic mechanisms filmmakers use to make the lone killer look impossibly cool.But on a deeper level, there are myriad symbolic pleasures to unpack, primarily derived from the assassin’s fundamental essence as a professional arbiter of death. By “symbolic pleasures” I mean the fantasies we get to borrow and try on at a safe distance. Cinema has always trafficked in these kinds of projected desires and anxieties, that’s what genres, stars and archetypes are for. But the lone killer amplifies this function, condensing into a single figure our contradictory longing for total freedom and autonomy, yet within the familiar framework of modernist culture, politics, and economics.We outline the dimensions of these symbolic pleasures. Total agency without negotiation or compromise, for instance. The killer embodies absolute decision-making and self-determination. In a culture of soft coercions, bureaucracy, b******t meetings, and interminable incompetence, the killer taps into a dark form of detached liberation. Although this notion is itself confounded to comic effect in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant Killing Them Softly (2012).The lone killer also exudes the romance of the outsider. The shadowy loner, an anti-citizen manipulating the system from the margins, carries a sense of mystery that endures, particularly in a time when sharing every aspect of our lives has become something of a default performative practice. Indeed, it’s fascinating to consider the lone killer as a symbol of alienation. They’re what a certain kind of loneliness looks like when it becomes active rather than depressive: isolation turned into method, detachment honed into a way of being in the world.For some killers, sexual desire is absolutely central to the mythos. Bond is the clearest prototype here, because scholarship has long framed him as a figure where violence is packaged with aspirational consumption and sexual charisma, all intertwined. And then there’s the sexual charge, which often isn’t “romance” so much as mobility: sex as another form of non-attachment, a proof that the killer can pass through bodies and spaces without being pinned down by them. Yet Bond films (and to an extent the character himself) have been read through a queer lens – breaking down the heteromasculine fantasy the films seem to promote (an aspect we discuss in some depth on this episode of the podcast: License to Queer).The real hook, though, is the fantasy of having no responsibilities to other humans. Or, more accurately, the fantasy of choosing your responsibilities. These protagonists often keep one small “human” attachment in a sealed container while everyone else becomes abstraction: targets, obstacles, and collateral damage. That compartmentalisation is the emotional technology that allows the lifestyle to function.Sexuality reads differently, of course, when the lone killer is a woman. The adoption of the femme fatale persona becomes both a weapon and a trap: seduction as tactical performance, but also as a ready-made framework through which her violence is contained, coded and often punished. The female lone killer frequently has to navigate the double bind of being hyper-visible as an object of desire while trying to claim the same cool detachment and professional focus afforded to her male counterparts.Then there’s competence as seduction. So many of these films function as “craft porn”: extended sequences of planning, surveillance, weapon prep, logistics, timing. We’re invited to admire mastery long before we’re asked to consider the consequences. That emphasis on hyper-competence often feeds into another recurring strand of lone-killer characterisation: a kind of obsessive, compulsive pathology. There is frequently an implicit, and sometimes explicit, suggestion that the killer is an outsider not just because of what they do, but because of how they are wired – uncomfortable with ordinary social interaction, more at home with systems and routines than with people. Being “out of sync” with the social world is then reframed as the superpower that underwrites their cold precision and attention to detail. It’s a trope that, to put it mildly, comes with its own problems around how neurodivergence and emotional detachment are conflated and aestheticised.Perhaps most importantly of all, though, the hitman/assassin symbolises the pleasure of circumventing – even actively challenging – the contradictions of the moral frameworks we’re all supposedly compelled by. On one level, it’s straightforward: breaking the laws of modern society to “get the job done” is stylised into an art form. But for many of these characters, especially those who aren’t simply nihilistic or coldly driven by money, there’s also a kind of ersatz morality at play. They possess a code, an ethos that operates as a moral alibi. Their relativist ethics become a way to expose the contingency, compromise, and hypocrisy of our broader systems of justice and citizenship. In watching them, we get to flirt with the fantasy of stepping outside that contradiction altogether.dariollinares.substack.comwww.cinematologists.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.comThe notion of the cinematic is an oft-floated term: a kind of critical get-out clause for when a writer (or speaker) wants to register approval without getting pinned down. It lets you gesture beyond the prosaic, narrative, structure, even aesthetics (too easily reduced to “mere beauty”), towards something supposedly larger and more complex to define.Ci…

Gwenno, on the set of her short film, Tresor (2022) [Copyright: Bosena / Alex Fish]We have the perfect theme song for our podcast, courtesy of the musician, artist and writer Gwenno. In Bristol in September, for the Encounters film festival, Neil took some time to chat to Gwenno at length about culture, social media, memory, capitalism and community, to put on [tape] some shared thoughts about life and art, before the podcast winds down. Even before writing and recording the theme tune to the Cinematologists - available to purchase and stream here - Gwenno was a friend of the show, and Neil wanted to give listeners the chance to hear from someone whose ideas and approaches to the making and absorbing of art have come to inspire and challenge his own. He also just really likes talking to her, and wanted podcast listeners to experience that pleasure also. Around that central conversation, inspired by it, Neil and Dario get into it about intersections of art and culture as they frequently do, plus challenges faced by contemporary youth, the critical engagement of students with the film industry, the quest for artistic authenticity, and the evolving nature of countercultures in the digital age. The conversation also touches on the impact of technology on creativity, the role of education in fostering cultural exploration, and reflections on historical subcultures like rave culture. Thanks to Maddie at Watershed in Bristol for providing a space to record during the Encounters Film Festival. Gwenno is currently touring and if she’s near you, you should go and see her, she’s an incredible live performer. This episode also features her songs ‘Tresor’, from the album and film of the same name, from 2022, and available to buy here, and ‘St Ives New School’, from this year’s brilliant record Utopia, which you can buy here. ———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

As always on The Cinematologists podcast, we like to address topics of salience, but in our own way and in our own time. The death of David Lynch left an irreplaceable hole in the fabric of cinema and, rightly, prompted immediate tributes from collaborators, as well as countless reflections on his status as an artist and filmmaker.The spectre of his influence has found its way into many episodes over the years: Scott Tanner Jones discussing Lynch’s impact in this episode on Physical Media, also in Neil’s conversation with Bertrand Bonello on The Beast, and in my conversation with Michel Chion, and has been referenced in numerous others. This was the third screening in Mark’s unofficial L.A. trilogy with us, following Big Wednesday and The Doors.Lost Highway has always existed at the edge of even Lynch’s already strange filmography. Critically dismissed at the time and commercially ignored (like most of Lynch’s work), it is now seen by many as the beginning of his late “L.A. Trilogy,” preceding Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. For both Neil and Mark, this film is personal, formative, and endlessly rewatchable—precisely because it resists resolution.Set in a murky Los Angeles that exists halfway between industrial hellscape and erotic fever dream, Lost Highway is a Möbius strip of a movie, beginning where it ends, and unravelling its characters and its viewers alike. It conjures its mood not just through narrative but through textures: light, shadow, analogue tape, blown-out industrial soundscapes, and those unnameable feelings that reverberate long after the final frame.The conversation is as engaging and in-depth as you’d expect, with Mark, Neil and the audience at Newlyn in top form. Key themes discussed include:* Lynch and memory’s strange register:Mark reflects on how Lynch’s films live in a different kind of memory register than most; more a series of fleeting snapshots than the coherence of active recall. Because of that, every viewing reveals new aspects; haunting fragments displace and rearrange entire subplots that had taken hold in the subconscious. In that sense, we consider Lynch’s cinema as a form of recursive hauntology.* The loop as trap (road to road):From the very first shot of that endless road to the repetition of sounds and visuals at the film’s end, Mark explores Lost Highway as a recursive loop that traps its characters in a fugue state of guilt, desire, and dissociation.* Structural ouroboros and influence:This structural ouroboros recalls the severed ear in Blue Velvet, or the rabbit-hole narrative of Mulholland Drive. For Mark, as a filmmaker, this formal approach is profoundly influential to his own sense of cinematic composition, time and narrative fracture.* Sexual jealousy and the violence of looking:The film’s narrative is anchored in the protagonist’s feelings of inadequacy, paranoia, and desire. The Mystery Man, played with uncanny chill by Robert Blake, becomes a vessel for projecting disowned guilt and dissociation.* Hollywood as a transformation machine:Patricia Arquette’s double role, and the thematic through-line of transformation (from Fred to Pete; from brunette to blonde), prompt a reading of the film as a noir dream of Hollywood, where people are consumed, remade, and destroyed by the gaze.* Sound as cinema:A recurring motif across the discussion is Lynch’s sonic world-building. Angelo Badalamenti’s score, Barry Adamson’s textures, and contributions from Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, David Bowie, and Marilyn Manson shape the film’s contours. It’s a work felt not just through images but through air movement and industrial pressure waves.* A sense of closure:Neil and Mark discuss the finality of Lynch’s oeuvre. “Everything is set now,” Mark says of the filmography. “There will be no more work from him. You watch it now in the context of a finished body of work, rather than imagining what he might do next.” Neil ends the episode quoting from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reflections on the Long Take in Cinema and Life, which felt apt.Neil and I continue the conversation around the central tension of the episode: how—or even whether—we’re supposed to “understand” Lost Highway. I reference Warren Buckland’s analysis of the film as a “puzzle film”: one whose clues scramble narrative logic and deny classical causality. Viewers are caught between “flaunted gaps” (overt mysteries like the videotapes) and “suppressed gaps” (dream sequences that promise meaning but deliver obfuscation).Lost Highway confronts you with the truth that “nothing makes sense.” Its refusal to resolve mirrors a deeper psychological or existential unease—a thematic throughline that aligns with other so-called “vibes films” we mention, such as Inherent Vice, Under the Silver Lake, and even Cronenberg’s recent The Shrouds—an interesting counterpoint in grief, surveillance, and ambience. A good engagement with this idea and Lynch’s career can be found in Ruby’s Hamilton’s recent piece for the London Review of Books.We talk about the character-swap device as Lynch tapping into a pathology of being unable to reconcile the self and the other. Lynch doesn’t just show identity breakdown; he renders it as form. The Fred–Pete body swap isn’t a mere plot twist—it’s an allegory of dissociation, repression, and the unassimilated parts of the psyche. A psychoanalytic reading points to how Lynch dramatises the internal exile of our “dark sides,” now returned as spectres, doubles, and avatars.Another key point of discussion is the brilliance of Patricia Arquette—mesmerising in a mode that adopts and then reverses the power dynamics of the gaze. Rather than being simply the object of the male gaze, Arquette’s character weaponises it—using sexuality and performative presence to manipulate, dominate, and escape. It’s arguably an apposite post-feminist staging of power inside patriarchal mechanics. As Neil reflects, Lynch’s women are never merely passive; they are agents, even in systems built to consume them.These are just some of the strands of discussion, but there’s much more to get your cinematic teeth into—including an ongoing bit about the appearance of ’Allo ’Allo! actor Guy Siner. (American listeners, you may need to google that one.)———Visit our Patreon at www.patreon.com/cinematologists———You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe

It felt apt that Neil and I were both in London for this year’s edition of the festival. Over the years of The Cinematologists, we’ve covered a range of international events, always striving to capture not just our critical responses to the films, but something of the atmosphere, the resonance of the experience itself.Living in London, I usually don’t feel that full, immersive festival bubble. There’s always the pull of everyday life at the edges. By contrast, attending an international festival abroad brings with it a heightened sense of dislocation—a kind of lived difference that reanimates the senses. That estrangement, combined with the charged intensity of being inside a self-contained epicentre of cinematic energy, somehow deepens both the viewing experience and one’s critical focus.With Neil in town for what amounted to an extended long weekend, I resolved to pack as much into five intense days of screenings, conversations, and cinematic overload. Normally, I prefer to experience films alone, especially at festivals. The solitude seems to both sharpen my concentration in the watching itself. But after a decade of co-hosting The Cinematologists, Neil and I have developed an unspoken rhythm - an ease in conversation and, just as importantly, sit together in that post-screening quiet, letting the film settle before the dialogue begins.We recorded the episode after our final screening together—François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. It proved an apt conclusion: gorgeously shot, restrained yet expressive, and, to my mind, remarkably faithful to the source material. Neil and I found ourselves immediately drawn into questions of form and aesthetics—recurring preoccupations on the podcast in recent years. How, and why, do filmmakers adopt particular visual modes to explore aspects of the human condition? And, more provocatively, is there an ethical contradiction in rendering violence, trauma, crisis, or poverty with beauty?Across this year’s programme, that tension between sensuous visuality and political critique felt ever-present—a paradox that became the connective tissue of our conversations throughout the episode. Many of the films, often formally inventive and emotionally arresting, provoked questions about how cinema confronts and represents the cruel absurdities of contemporary experience, something I’ve been preoccupied with throughout this cinematic year.Ozon’s film, of course, approaches this quite literally, but for me, so many of the works we saw continued a broader trend: filmmakers striving to make sense of senselessness through audio-visual forms that both frame the social and implicate the viewer. Themes of displacement, memory, alienation, and the ethics of representation ran through much of our discussion, as did a shared sense that contemporary filmmakers are consciously reconfiguring documentary, fiction, and hybrid modes to articulate a pervasive cultural unease.We hope you enjoy the conversation, and as usual, we welcome any comments on the films or what we say about them.As always, thanks for coming back or clicking for the first time on Contrawise. If you’re here for the first time, I’m an errant academic, writing and speaking about cinema, media, and art with a philosophical approach.Films discussed on the episodeThe Stranger (dir. Francois Ozon)Ozon’s adaptation of Camus’ existential classic centres on Meursault, a detached and indifferent Frenchman in colonial Algeria who, weeks after his mother’s funeral, impulsively kills an unnamed Arab man on a sun-drenched beach. The subsequent trial becomes an inquiry not only into the murder but into the absurdist senselessness.Starring the excellent Benjamin Voisin, embodying the character’s apathy, alienation, and refusal to conform to moral expectations. Shot with Ozon’s characteristically meticulous visual control, the film is gorgeously rendered—its romantic luminosity almost at odds with the bleakness of the material. In our discussion, we consider whether this sumptuous aesthetic intensifies or undermines the sense of existential ennui that lies at the heart of Camus’ seminal text.Kontinental ‘25 (dir. Radu Jude)Perhaps the most compelling film of the festival for both of us, Kontinental 25 cements Jude’s position as one of the most innovative criticially astute filmmakers working today. Shot on an iPhone 15 in just nine days, we delve into its structure: long, single-take dialogues that blur the boundaries between satire, social critique, and observational realism. Jude’s commitment to implicating the viewer in contemporary dilemmas - homelessness, inequality, liberal guilt - is both brutal and hilarious. A masterclass in how form and ideology intertwine.The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)Neil’s solo review of Reichardt’s latest, featuring Josh O’Connor. We’ve always loved Reichardt on the podcast; an early live event focused on Old Joy (2006), and how her genre work and character studies are steeped in rich, observational minimalism. Neil explores how the film takes the heist genre and infuses it with her ongoing cinematic interests in economic precarity, disconnection, and quiet desperation.It continues a fascination with the work of O’Connor for Neil too, following him finally ‘getting’ the actor in his favourite 2024 release, Alice Rohrwacher’s sublime La Chimera. With The Mastermind, Neil particularly liked how Reichardt plays with genre twists, from classic heist mode to something more reflective in terms of a character’s odyssey of reckoning on the road. Definitely a favourite from the fest, and the year as a whole.It Was Just an Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, is a deceptively simple film that unfolds into the profound. Unlike his more overtly meta-cinematic works, this is a relatively linear narrative, yet it bears all of the Iranian auteur’s hallmarks: moral tension, black humour, and an acute sense of the everyday as political theatre.The story begins with a family driving through the Iranian countryside at night. A momentary lapse—a dog struck on a quiet road—sets in motion a chain of events that spiral into something far darker. When their car breaks down, they arrive at a remote garage run by a man named Vahid. Hearing the father’s prosthetic leg knock against the floorboards, Vahid becomes convinced he has found one of his former torturers from a prison camp where he was held blindfolded decades earlier. What follows is an unsettling, almost allegorical narrative of suspicion, revenge, and moral reckoning. Panahi transforms this familiar premise into a complex study of guilt, trauma, and retribution.Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin)Mark Jenkin’s third feature - produced in association with Neil’s Sound/Image Cinema Lab - continues his commitment to the tactile, handmade qualities of cinema while venturing into his most expansive and narratively ambitious work to date. On the surface, Rose of Nevada employs a familiar conceit: two young fishermen, played by Callum Turner and George MacKay, are sent aboard a trawler that mysteriously reappears after having been lost at sea for thirty years. Once they set sail, time begins to fold in on itself, and what follows is a haunting, non-sci-fi exploration of memory, loss, and the persistence of the past.Rose of Nevada is, quite simply, ravishing to look at. The colours - deep, saturated, defiantly un-digital - seem to breathe with the Cornish landscape and seascape. Abstract intercuts of bark, light, water, and surface give the film a kind of expressionist pulse; images shimmer between the material and the metaphysical.We discuss Jenkin’s characteristic approach to performance - “Bressonian deadpan” - where actors deliver lines with studied restraint, becoming cyphers for ideas and emotional undercurrents rather than expressive psychological portraits. The film feels like a confluence of Jenkin’s earlier work - Bait’s class-inflected regional politics and Enys Men’s metaphysical strangeness - now realised at a larger scale and with bolder artistic confidence. It recalls the material realism of Leviathan and even the mythic textures of Jaws, though entirely on Jenkin’s own terms.And, I share my “I went swimming with George MacKay” anecdote.My interview with Mark from earlier in 2025 when he had just finished editing the film.Also mentioned in the episodeSinging Wings (dir. Hemen Khaledi)Dry Leaf (dir. Alexandre Koberidze)The Son and The Sea (dir. Stroma Cairns)After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino)Becoming Human (dir. Polen Ly)Dreams (dir. Michel Frano)With Hassan in Gaza (dir. Kamal Aljafari)Palestine 36 (dir. Annemarie Jacir)You can listen to The Cinematologists for free, wherever you listen to podcasts: click here to follow.We really appreciate any reviews you might write (please send us what you have written and we’ll mention it) and sharing on Social Media is the lifeblood of the podcast, so please do that if you enjoy the show.———Music Credits:‘Theme from The Cinematologists’Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dariollinares.substack.com/subscribe