Author: James Ruzicka

Ines Braga hangs out at the Popcorn Counter with us this week, where she confesses that she really doesn’t like musicals. But there are a few notable exceptions, including last week’s masterpiece West Side Story. Is there a rule that distinguishes good movie musicals from bad ones? Why do The Lion King, Frozen and Moana succeed […]

Tonight, tonight, we’re joined by screenwriter Ines Braga to sing a song of two musical pictures, the new Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, helmed by A Star is Born director Bradley Cooper, and Bernstein’s own 1961 masterpiece, West Side Story. They’re both very enjoyable, but which one has more to say about contemporary la la la […]

It’s the show we’ve been anticipating for the last twelve months, the Two Reel Cinema Club Film of the Year Show. We’ve seen some masterpieces this year, we’ve seen some real clunkers, we’ve seen some incredible performances and we’ve seen some very eye catching hats. Who will win, who will get a dishonourable mention, and […]

Happy Holidays from the Two Reel Cinema Club, as we watch one of the funniest, dourest and most heartfelt Christmas films we’ve seen in years, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. We discover it perched under the mistletoe kissing a film forty years its senior, 1983’s English private school drama Another Country. These two films both examine […]

You might think we saw enough hats for one lifetime last week in Napoleon and Barry Lyndon but no, we want more. Join us as we doff our hats to the finest headgear in Hollywood. Which is the most famous hat in cinema? Who has the biggest hat in the MCU? How did cowboys decide […]

Join us in the Eighteenth Century this episode as we compare the new Ridley Scott feature Napoleon with its 1975 forefather, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It’s an explosion of candlelight and costume design, huge battles and intimate character moments. But it does make us wonder: why is the French Language no longer the Lingua Franca […]

Persepolis, Watchmen, Ghost World, American Splendor, Akira, Gemma Bovary… can you see the pattern yet? After watching David Fincher’s The Killer last week, we look at films that have been adapted from graphic novels. Which ones work, and which ones don’t? And what’s the common factor that makes a good adaptation? Plus, we talk about […]

Two films, two assassins, and two hundred thousand bullets this episode, as we watch the new David Fincher film The Killer and compare it to John Woo’s 1989 breakout Hong Kong action spectacular The Killer. There’s no denying the technical craft on display here, but while there’s a lot of bloodshed is there perhaps a […]

It’s not just a feeling in your bladder, it’s actually true. Films really are getting longer. After struggling with the length of Killers of the Flower Moon last week, we analyse a few statistics about how film length has changed in the last forty years. Is it to do with length of a VHS tape? […]

We take two dark journeys into the American West in this episode as we watch the new Martin Scorsese picture Killers of the Flower Moon, and compare it to Sergio Leone’s 1969 classic Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s an epic total of six hours of gunshots, dirt, crime, money, corruption and revenge, […]