Podcast · Film & TV

The Cinematologists Podcast

by Dario Llinares & Prof. Neil Fox · English · Film & TV

Film academics Dr Dario Llinares and Prof. Neil Fox discuss a range of films and dissect film culture from many different perspectives. The podcast also features interviews with filmmakers, scholars, writers and actors who debate all aspects of cinema. dariollinares.substack.com

New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 1 hr 27 min
Latest: 29 Apr 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

29 Apr 2026 · 4 min

Sinners, Warfare and One to One: John and Yoko

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.com Welcome Friends A 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

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

4 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
American Animals w/dir. Bart Layton
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…
29 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 49 min
Best films of 2025 and our final podcast.
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…
22 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 15 min
The Clinical Trials of David Cronenberg w/Violet Lucca
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…
15 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 27 min
Taxonomy of the Lone Killer
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…
26 Nov 2025 · 6 min
Bonus Episode - Evoking The Cinematic in Sorry, Baby and Nickel Boys
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.com The 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…
25 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 46 min
Culture & Creativity w/ Gwenno
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…
5 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 59 min
David Lynch's Lost Highway (featuring director Mark Jenkin)
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…
20 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 2 min
London Film Festival 2025
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…
17 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 11 min
Don't Look Now and Then (w/Justin John Doherty)
Filming Don’t Look Now. Copyright: Peter Cassell. Neil and Justin John Doherty have been friends since 1995. To mark thirty years of friendship, in the latest episode of the podcast they talk about Justin’s latest creative peak, an art-book with amazing, never seen before, behind the scenes photos and production artefacts, love letters and conversations, about his favourite film, the Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland starring, Don’t Look Now. The conversation starts with Neil’s reminisce of how the film has been Justin’s favourite as long as they have known each other, upon meeting at…
3 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 14 min
PTA's latest, Redford reflections and some big podcast news
We are back! Season 22 kicks off with a stellar, loose, multi-layered, melancholic, heated and nervy, shambling odyssey of an episode, which befits the central discussion, centred as it is around the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The timing of the release of the new PTA is fortuitous as he is a filmmaker that we have circled around over the years, given my love for the filmmaker, as well as his place in contemporary American cinema. It’s also good timing as the film has found itself lodged at the centre of film discourse in so many ways since its release last…
31 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 52 min
The Cinematologists Present: Students on Screen
This special episode of The Cinematologists is a contribution to the Students on Screen project convened by Dr Kay Calver and Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, to coincide with a special issue of Open Screens they have edited, which explores screen representations of students across a plethora of Global screen media forms. On behalf of The Cinematologists, Neil contributed a paper - drawing from his decade-old doctoral work - on representations of film students in anglophone cinema, and put together this episode, which is both a dissemination of and critical artefact of, the special issue. For this…
21 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 32 min
Terrence Malick (w/John Bleasdale)
For the final [main] episode of this season, the 21st, we are delighted to welcome writer and podcaster John Bleasdale ( Writers on Film ) to the show, to discuss his excellent book on Terrence Malick, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick . Neil talks to John about his approach to research and interview/archive given the glaring lack of a central subject's voice, Malick and John's own relationship to the big themes around philosophy and faith, the power of understanding Malick's later period work anew through the lens of [auto]biography, and the ways that Malick's…
11 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 28 min
Pavements (& Videoheaven w/Alex Ross Perry)
Welcome friends. Thanks for stopping by and welcome to the many new free subscribers that have signed up in the last few weeks. A very special thanks to Helen , Bluetrue , R.J. MacReady , & sukhveer kang for becoming paid subscribers. I really do appreciate your support. Postcards should be coming your way anytime (if you haven’t yet DM’d me your address, please do that if you want a little physical media token of my gratitude). Subscribe now I’m working on a couple of longer written pieces, to be published next week. These are articles that have been on my mind for a little while and I…
10 Jul 2025 · 47 min
On being Audio-Viewers: A response to FilmStack Challenge #4
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.com Welcome friends, It’s been an somewhat frustrating uneven week of film watching and writing. London’s recent heatwaves have nudged my daily routine into what has become a typical summer cadence - work kicking off around 6am and tapering off by early afternoon. It’s a strategy to placate my internal productivity tyrant: my focus is aided by the cooler mornings by 2pm I’ve kinda reached the limit of writing energy. This week though, the humdrum churn of life-admin has thrown a wrench into that flow. Those…
4 Jul 2025 · 9 min
The Learned and The Learner
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit dariollinares.substack.com Welcome friends. Thanks for lending me some of your valued attention. This wasn’t the post I intended for today. I’m working on a longer exploration of current debates unfolding on Film Stack—particularly around questions of what Film Stack actually is—and the recent flurry of posts that allude, explicitly and implicitly, to a shared agenda or set of aims, i.e. a manifesto. Film and art manifestos have always fascinated me. Their parameters, their intentionality, and their fallibilities offer a snapshot…
27 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 48 min
Ryan Gilbey (It Used to be Witches)
With the podcast half-way through its tenth year it is a privilege to welcome back a former contributor to the show - read his piece on Clueless for The New Statesman that coincided with his previous appearance on the show - and long-time champion of The Cinematologists, Ryan Gilbey. Ryan's return is to promote and discuss his new book, the astoundingly good, It Used to be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema, published this month (June 2025) by Faber. Around the release date, I (Neil) sat down in Cinema 1 at the Barbican in London to discuss the book, the form(s) of Queer Cinema, Ryan's…
13 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 19 min
Tornado (w/director John Maclean)
A decade ago John Maclean made his debut feature, the brilliant Western Slow West (2015).It followed a run of brilliant short films and music videos, as well as some of the late 90s and early 2000s most distinctive music during his time in the Beta Band. Tornado - Set in the rugged landscape of 1790s Britain, Tornado (Kōki) is a young and determined Japanese woman who finds herself caught in a perilous situation when she and her father’s (Takehiro Hira) travelling puppet Samurai show crosses paths with a gang of ruthless criminals led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his ambitious son Little Sugar…
28 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 18 min
Crime, Genre, Class, Race, Gender
We're back with an episode featuring just Neil and myself discussing a cinematic topic we both are invested in: The crime/heist genre. The core of this chat is an examination of how the structures of the genre intersect with social, racial, and economic contexts in four specific films. Sparked by our shared admiration for Justin Kurzel's The Order, we trace the lineage of socially conscious crime narratives from classic noir to contemporary thrillers. We consider genre cinema's desire to convey a sense of prestige - think of the notion of elevated horror - and revisit some of the core…
11 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 44 min
The Doors & Val Kilmer (w/filmmaker Mark Jenkin)
In late March 2025 we screened Oliver Stone's 1991 epic myth of 1960s America, The Doors, at Newlyn Filmhouse at the invitation of regular Cinematologist, filmmaker Mark Jenkin. The conversation following the screening covered Jim Morrison and the band, 1960s America, Vietnam, film form and the longstanding influence of the film on Mark's work, up to and including his new film, Rose of Nevada, due for release later this year. A few days after the screening news came of Val Kilmer's death and that prompted a rejigging of the release schedule for the podcast, so that Neil and Dario could talk…
28 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 27 min
Polish Filmmaker Wojciech Has w/Michael Brooke
As part of this year's Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, currently running in London, Michael Brooke has curated a complete retrospective of the criminally under-known Polish director Wojciech Has. The retrospective, starting from the 1st April 2025 and featuring screenings at the BFI and the ICA, contains Has's short and feature film work in gorgeous restorations. There are talks and events around the films, and the ICA has an exhibition of Polish film posters which is unmissable if you're in the vicinity. For this episode, Neil talks to curator Michael Brooke about Has's life and work, and…
10 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 41 min
Rod Stoneman on Artistic Forms of Thought
For the latest episode we are honoured to share a recent talk at Falmouth University's School of Film & Television by Rod Stoneman titled 'Amongst Artistic Forms of Thought'. Rod's talk discussed different and often radical uses of film form to move the art form and audience thinking into different, not literal, not factual, non information-driven places. To illustrate his talk he drew on a number of filmic examples including two different engagements with Hitchcock's work. To close the talk Rod discussed the work of his late friend Malcolm Le Grice, who had a deep association with the UK…
17 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 16 min
Mario and Mandela Van Peebles in conversation
It was an absolute joy to welcome actor, director, producer and writer Mario van Peebles to The Cinematologists Podcast. In London to show his new film Outlaw Posse as part of the Black Rodeo season at the BFI, I was able to talk with him and his son Mandela, who also stars in the film, about his lifelong interest in Westerns, particularly in the often cliched, often forgotten role of African American's in the Western mythos. Outlaw Posse is more of a companion piece than a sequel to his 1993 film Posse; this new work mines similar territory with its generic rawness infused with social…
8 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 29 min
BFI Chantal Akerman Retrospective
We are really excited to be collaborating with the BFI once again, particularly for an episode on Belgian auteur filmmaker Chantal Akerman as they begin an in-depth retrospective of her work. In the autumn of 2022, Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was voted the greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound Magazine's once-a-decade poll. We covered that moment with a double episode - which would be a fantastic primer for this show if you haven't listened to it yet. The episode features a conversation in which Dario speaks to Céline Brouwez, the…
31 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 8 min
Small Things Like These (w/director Tim Mielants)
We kick off season 21 and the tenth year of The Cinematologists with a special conversation with Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants about his work on recent release, Small Things Like These, written by Enda Walsh (Hunger) and starring and produced by Cillian Murphy. In the conversation, Neil and Tim discuss film form and style, particularly the use of close-up, space and the Gothic, masculinity, grief and how being an outsider can provide a unique take on the material and experiences of people from a place that is not one's own. Elsewhere, Neil and Dario dig down into this idea of who gets to…
27 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 42 min
2024 Review - Dario and Neil's top five films of the year.
This is part 2 of our end of year review show in which we countdown from 5 to 1. As requested from our Patreon members and several other long time listeners, we've gone back to a top ten countdown, which was great fun to compile. Although Neil and I did not agree on our top choice, we did share several films that made both our lists. There was also one major disagreement, and it was fascinating to spend some time hashing that out. We also give some honourable mentions of which there were a few in a year where there was a lot to like, if not vintage, particularly in mainstream cinema.…
4 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 50 min
Club Zero (w/ Jessica Hausner) & Rumours (w/ Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson)
In a bumper episode, the penultimate one of the year, Dario interviews Jessica Hausner about her new film Club Zero and Guy Maddin, Evan, and Galen Johnson about Rumours. Both films have limited UK releases this week (Friday, December 6th), and, interestingly, though they are very different films, they have thematic connections, particularly in relation to contemporary crises, social critique, and satirical modes. Club Zero stars a very well-cast Mia Wasikowska as Ms. Novak, a girlish teacher whose radical ideas about diet lead a group of students down a dangerous path. Dario's conversation…
28 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 27 min
Professor Vivian Sobchack, in Conversation
In this return to the long-form interview format, The Cinematologists are deeply honoured to welcome Professor Vivian Sobchack to the podcast. In an incredibly profound and wide-ranging conversation, Dario discusses with Prof. Sobchack a diverse array of topics related to her work and life as one of the most important and influential thinkers and writers on cinema. The subjects covered include: The Evolution of Film Studies: Vivian reflects on film studies' early formation in the United States and the profound impact of phenomenology on the discipline. She shares rich insights into how our…
11 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 38 min
Author: The JT Leroy Story @ Falmouth Book Festival 2024 (w/Colin Midson)
In what is something of a throwback episode nowadays, Neil hosted a screening of Jeff Feuerzig's film about Laura Albert [JT Leroy] as the opening event of the 2024 Falmouth Book Festival, recording the post-film conversation for the podcast. For the post-film chat Neil was joined by the director of Falmouth Book Festival, Colin Midson, who had a unique perspective on the story, as he was the publicist for JT Leroy's first book, Sarah, when it was released. If you haven't seen the film or don't know the story of JT Leroy, we recommend you watch it, or look up the story before listening, not…
18 Oct 2024 · 1 hr 14 min
BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Episode 2
Our second London Film Festival main episode is here, and it's a bumper edition. Dario is in Falmouth visiting Neil, so it's something of a nostalgic live taping from the place where The Cinematologists started. The first film on the agenda is Alex Ross Perry's Pavements, which is a meta-documentary on a mercurial 90s band, Pavement. Neil, with his music film expertise, gives detailed context to the history and mythology of the band, whose cult status is deliberately explored by Ross Perry. It is another film that plays with multiple forms and perspectives and is also an instructive…

About The Cinematologists Podcast

The Cinematologists Podcast is a English film & tv podcast from Dario Llinares & Prof. Neil Fox. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Dario Llinares & Prof. Neil Fox
Language: English
Category: Film & TV
New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 1 hr 27 min
Latest episode: 29 Apr 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id981479854
Rights: Dario Llinares

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