Brand new audio commentaries for cult and classic movies, by the filmmakers and other interesting people.
Comments? Feedback? Suggestions? Email David *at* Rogue-Commentary *dot* com or on Twitter and Instagram @RogueCommentary
We have lots of exciting episodes in the works, so if you like what
In this episode of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes, we’re uncovering the story of 1986 conspiracy thriller Defence of the Realm with the film’s screenwriter, Martin Stellman – perhaps best known for the stone cold classic Quadrophenia. When I came to choose my contributions to the forthcoming book The Great Unwatched: 200 Must-See Movies You May Have Missed , Defence of the Realm was one of the first films that came to mind, not only because it’s should be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, but mainly because nobody seems to talk about it any more.…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. On this episode, we’re delighted to bring you David Stenn’s commentary for his 2007 documentary Girl 27 . I only recently came across this film, in which David, in the course of researching his biography of Jean Harlow, stumbled across the story of the 1937 MGM scandal, in which rising starlet Patricia Douglas accused the film studio into tricking her into attending a stag party, during which she was raped. Incredibly, David discovered that Douglas was still alive, and tracked her down to her Las…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. On this episode, I’m delighted to be joined by my former Empire magazine colleague Ian Nathan, writer and director of The Thing Expanded , a brand new five-hour documentary about John Carpenter’s The Thing that’s as packed as the ice around Outpost 31. A follow-up to Ian’s definitive documentary Aliens Expanded , The Thing Expanded boasts interviews with John Carpenter, Kurt Russell and many other members of the cast and crew, as well as superfans Guillermo del Toro and Frank Darabont.…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. We don’t normally do audio commentaries for documentaries, because they often don’t need that extra metatextual level of commentary, as they’re kind of self-explanatory. But as soon as I’d finished watching Homegrown , I was eager to speak with Michael Premo to discover more of the story behindit, because although Michael himself is right in the thick of the film’s action, he lets the subjects of the film speak for themselves. No documentary can be fully objective, and few films are likely…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m thrilled to have reunited the brilliant British actor Paul McGann with author and screenwriter John Collee, 35 years after Paul starred in Christopher Morahan’s perfect/no notes adaptation of John’s novel A Paper Mask. I’ll bet there is no bigger fan of 1990’s Paper Mask than me. Paul is sensational as the hospital porter who steals the identity of a doctor and begins practicing medicine at a big hospital, with inevitable, tragic and yet still shocking consequences.…
Hello! Welcome to a very special edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this 'minisode', I’m excited to bring you a special preview of the brand new, exclusive audio commentary recorded by writer-director Luna Carmoon for her exquisite, critically-acclaimed film Hoard. The full commentary will be available only on Plumeria Pictures’ forthcoming Blu-ray of the film, which is available for pre-order now only at PlumeriaPics.co.uk and released on February 14, 2025. If you can’t wait til then, you can listen to the first 20-odd minutes of the audio…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome critic John Bleasdale, author of The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick for an informed and informative walk through Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Comments? Feedback? Suggestions? Email David *at * Rogue-Commentary *dot* com or send us a tweet . We have lots of exciting episodes in the works, so if you like what you hear – or just the idea – please subscribe, and…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This episode is a bit different: ever mindful of the plight of the environment, it’s actually a recycled episode of the politics podcast Podcasting in Praxis with David, Jamie, Alasdair, Rob and James working out some issues with Alex Garland’s 2024 movie Civil War. The film was too much of a mess for me to coalesce many of my own thoughts about it – other than “Jesse Plemons good” – and although I read many reviews, I felt that only the Podcasting is Praxis team fully articulated my…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This episode is really personal for me, not only because Rupert Wainwright has been a good friend of mine for 25 years, but because Stigmata is the reason we met. While working on Divine Rites: The Story of Stigmata , a documentary about the film and the phenomenon, I wrote and pitched to Rupert a pilot script designed to be a spin-off of the film, using the Congregation of the Causes of Saints as a kind of X-Files show in which our hero would travel the world investigating mysteries and…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by David Hughes. For this episode, I’m joined by Damien Lewis, author of the non-fiction book The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare , the first third of which is now a major motion picture directed by Guy Ritchie. I read – no, devoured the book before I saw the film, but if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered how many ‘based on a true story’ captions came up before the film started, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it – the story was just too deliciously outrageous to be true. But it is. Surely no human…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, we’re joined by Swiss director Peter Luisi for a fascinating discussion about his new film The Last Screenwriter , the first film scripted entirely by A.I. – specifically ChatGPT4.0 Now, before you grab your pitchforks and burning torches and lay siege to Rogue Commentary HQ, hear me out: I’m staunchly, even militantly anti-A.I. in the arts. But when I heard that London’s beloved Prince Charles Cinema had called off what was to be the world premiere of The Last…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to be joined by director Alberto Corredor for a peek under the hood of his terrific 2023 horror movie BAGHEAD. When I first saw the film, reviewing it for Time Out , it had a very late embargo, which normally means you can expect the worst. But even though I didn’t go in with low expectations – because I like to give every film a fair shot – I was still mightily impressed, not only by Freya Allen’s terrifically spiky performance, but also by the way Corredor…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m thrilled to welcome Jen Johans, award-winning writer, film critics, essayist and historian, and host of the excellent Watch With Jen podcast. Now, that has really good guests, but Jen must be short for Jenerous because she always gives her guests more of the floor than she uses herself, so I thought it’d be perfect to invite her to record a solo commentary, and choose any film she wanted, and I’m super excited she chose Norman Jewison's timeless 1987 romantic…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome Gonzalo López-Gallego and José David Montero, director and cinematographer respectively of the terrific neo-noir American Star, in which Ian McShane plays an ex-soldier-turned-hitman who travels to Fuertaventura, one of the Canary Islands, to do a job, and finds himself on a journey into his soul. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, we’re doing a second episode covering the splendid neo-noir American Star, in which Ian McShane plays an…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome Gonzalo López-Gallego and José David Montero, director and cinematographer respectively of the terrific neo-noir American Star, in which Ian McShane plays an ex-soldier-turned-hitman who travels to Fuertaventura, one of the Canary Islands, to do a job, and finds himself on a journey into his soul. It’s an elegiac, ruminative and surprisingly affecting film, with a captivating performance by McShane. He’s so good, in fact, so mesmerizing, that…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome Lee Roy Kunz, co-writer, co-director and star of the impressive horror movie Deliver Us (2023), which – as you know, because you wouldn’t listen to an audio commentary without seeing the film first – concerns a priest sent to investigate a nun who believes that the immaculately-conceived twins she is carrying are destined to be the messiah and the antichrist. Filmed during the pandemic, mostly in Estonia, it’s an extraordinarily accomplished…
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This is a bittersweet episode; basically an edited and extended version of the audio commentary I recorded with director David Leland eighteen months before his death on Christmas Eve at the age of 82. The commentary was ostensibly for his 1990 drama The Big Man, starring Liam Neeson, Billy Connolly, Ian Bannen, Joanne Whalley – then Joanne Whalley-Kilmer – Hugh Grant and Peter Mullan, but David was so generous with his time we ended up talking about other films, including Mona…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to be joined by John Walsh , author of the exceptionally detailed, exhaustively researched and endlessly entertaining The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film , just out from Titan Books. We’re going to be watching the version of The Wicker Man known as The Final Cut, which has slightly different running times depending on the frame rate, but should stay in sync throughout our chat. John has spoken to almost literally everyone for the book, anyone…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome the legendary Daniel Waters , screenwriter of Heathers, Demolition Man, Batman Returns and the film we’re here to talk about today: Hudson Hawk . It's well known that Hudson Hawk went wildly off the rails during production, but whether you love it or loathe it – for me it’s a little from column 'A', a little from column 'B' – it was fascinating to hear Steven De Souza’s exclusive Hudson Hawk commentary right here on Rogue Commentary back in March,…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome esteemed critic and essayist Priscilla Page for a walk through Phil Alden Robinson’s unimprovable 1992 classic Sneakers . The commentary was recorded for Plumeria Pictures’ formidable 30th anniversary Blu-ray release, which also includes two other commentaries and a brilliant 45-minute video interview with the writer and director. It's available more or less exclusively from PlumeriaPics.co.uk with worldwide shipping available. Huge thanks to…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. On this episode, we take a deep dive into Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller Cape Fear , itself based on John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners , in which lawyer Sam Bowden and his family are terrorised by Max Cady, a violent rapist whom Sam testified against in a trial that helped put him in prison for more than a decade. In crafting his own exceptional take on the source materials, screenwriter Wesley Strick twists the knife still further, by making…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome author Paul Tremblay for a walk through M. Night Shyamalan’s film Knock at the Cabin , adapted from Paul’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World . Being a fan of the book before I saw the film, I was fascinated by the story divergences between the source and the adaptation, and was absurdly excited when Paul agreed to record a commentary discussing the ideas behind the book and his thoughts about the film. I was even more thrilled when Paul told…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This is our first episode to feature a documentary, which is not surprising because documentaries normally speak for themselves. But I think Electric Malady is such a unique presentation, I was really keen to discover the story of how it came to be, and some of the techniques that were used to film it so sensitively. I assume you’ve seen the BAFTA nominated film if you’ve made it this far, but if you haven’t, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Like most people, I hadn’t really heard of…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome back my screenwriting hero and mentor Steven de Souza , who not only wrote some of our all-time favourite action movies – Die Hard, 48 Hours, Commando and, yes, The Running Man – but also several early, formative drafts of the infamous 1991 action-romantic-comedy-trainwreck Hudson Hawk , subsequently rewritten by Daniel Waters and an ad-libbing Bruce Willis. It's well known that Hudson Hawk went wildly off the rails during production, but whether…
Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This episode is sponsored by boutique Blu-ray label Plumeria Pictures, whose latest release is The Big Man, aka Crossing the Line, an underrated 1990 drama with a blistering lead performance by Liam Neeson, and a cast that includes Joanne Whalley, Ian Bannen, Billy Connolly, Hugh Grant, Peter Mullan and more. The Blu-ray contains not one but three new audio commentaries, from producer Stephen Woolley, director David Leland and screenwriter Don Macpherson. Check out this and other Plumeria…
Hello! Welcome to the latest edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. This episode is sponsored by boutique Blu-ray label Plumeria Pictures, whose latest release is The Big Man, aka Crossing the Line, an underrated 1990 drama with a blistering lead performance by Liam Neeson, and a cast that includes Joanne Whalley, Ian Bannen, Billy Connolly, Hugh Grant, Peter Mullan and more. The Blu-ray contains not one but three new audio commentaries, from producer Stephen Woolley, director David Leland and screenwriter Don Macpherson. Check out this and other…
Hello! Welcome to the latest edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. For this episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Hayley Schore, co-screenwriter of Call Jane , Carol director Phyllis Nagy’s under-appreciated 2022 film about the "Janes", the underground group that gave Chicago women access to abortions in the pre-Roe v Wade years. Needless to say the film, which stars Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina and Kata Mara, took on a horrible new resonance when the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022. I really enjoyed…
Hello! Welcome to the latest edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. In this episode I’m very excited to be joined by screenwriter Jill Gevargizian, co-writer, director and producer of 2020’s brilliant Kansas City-set horror film The Stylist , in which a profoundly disturbed hair stylist, played by the phenomenal Najarra Townsend, gives very special hair treatment to her clients. Eat your heart out, Sweeney Todd. I’ve been a fan of this understated film – which you can find here (US) and here (UK) – since I first saw it, and although there’s a fantastic…
Hello! Welcome to the latest edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. In this, the 21st episode, I’m very excited to be joined by screenwriter Don Macpherson, who skilfully adapted William McIlvanney’s brilliant novel The Big Man into the hugely underrated film of the same name, directed by David Leland and starring Liam Neeson, Ian Bannen, Billy Connolly, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Hugh Grant and Peter Mullan, with music by Ennio Morricone. Produced by Stephen Woolley under the Palace Pictures banner, The Big Man sadly wasn’t a big hit, but it really…
Hello! Welcome to the latest – as in very late – edition of the exclusive audio commentary podcast hosted by me, David Hughes. On this episode, I'm delighted to welcome writer-director Paul Andrew Williams and actor Neil Maskell for a journey through the making of the brutal, brilliant British revenge thriller Bull . For best results, cue it up to the film, which is available to watch in the UK here and in the US here . My intro will tell you where to cue up the film, and when to press play. Thanks to Marek Steven and Signature Entertainment for hooking us up. Comments? Feedback?…
About ROGUE COMMENTARY
Brand new audio commentaries for cult and classic movies, by the filmmakers and other interesting people.
Comments? Feedback? Suggestions? Email David *at* Rogue-Commentary *dot* com or on Twitter and Instagram @RogueCommentary
We have lots of exciting episodes in the works, so if you like what
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