Cinema talk before the reaction settles.
Eavesdropping at the Movies follows Mike and Jose straight out of the cinema, where first impressions turn into patient argument. Recent episodes move from desert rave apocalypse and Brazilian political thriller to gothic adaptation, courtroom history, horror comedy, and strange art-house comedy.
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Eavesdropping at the Movies has the feel of two people leaving a screening before their thoughts have cooled. Mike and Jose speak from the residue of the film: a full cinema, a surprising laugh, a scene that did not quite work, a performance that changes the temperature of the room. The result is conversational criticism with a long memory. A new release is rarely treated as only itself. Sirat leads them from a desert rave in Morocco to grief, minefields, anti-war music, apocalypse, and the moral cost of following a desperate man. The Secret Agent becomes a way to talk about political cover-ups, dictatorship, Recife, shark attacks, carnival, and surreal newspaper mythology. Wuthering Heights is approached less as a fidelity test than as a film with its own erotic logic, its own staging of consent, cruelty, youth, and adaptation anxiety. Send Help gives them room to enjoy comic violence while asking whether the film's gender politics are as sharp as its shocks and jokes. Pillion brings a more vulnerable register, with BDSM, gay desire, supportive parents, and an ending that unexpectedly carries emotional force. Nuremberg draws sharper skepticism, especially around historical seriousness, courtroom drama, archival pastiche, and the question of whether weighty subject matter has become weighty filmmaking. Older conversations on The Menu and Poor Things show the same habit of pushing past surface pleasures into questions of class satire, artifice, authorship, performance, and visual style. The show is not tidy. It circles. It doubles back. One speaker may be moved while the other is still testing the structure. A joke can sit beside a grave political reading without cancelling it. Enthusiasm is allowed, but so is impatience. The copybook version of criticism would reduce a film to verdict, theme, and score. Eavesdropping at the Movies is more interested in how a response is made: through comparison, disagreement, plot memory, audience feeling, and the stubborn particularity of scenes.
Made for: For filmgoers who enjoy post-screening conversation that is thoughtful, specific, and willing to argue with itself. It especially suits listeners drawn to genre, art-house releases, adaptations, political thrillers, horror comedy, and performance-focused criticism.
What sets it apart: The show preserves the immediacy of leaving the cinema while still making room for serious interpretation. Its strength is the way Mike and Jose move from plot detail to political context, formal judgment, and emotional response without sanding away uncertainty.
"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experie…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mike and Jose turn post-screening disagreement into precise criticism of how films create meaning and where their choices come apart.
Mike and Jose approach each film through an immediate, searching conversation that leaves room for disagreement. They test initial reactions against direction, performance and visual choices, often revising or sharpening a judgment as they talk.
The credits roll; Mike and Jose give your argument about the film's choices somewhere to go.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Mike and Jose follow Sirat from a missing-daughter search into grief, minefields and a desert shaped by sound.
A missing daughter pulls Eavesdropping at the Movies into Sirat's desert rave, where the search curdles into grief, drugs, minefields and an end-of-the-world horizon.
A measured review of The Secret Agent's slow burn, surreal clues, and political violence.
Eavesdropping at the Movies reads The Secret Agent as a Brazilian historical political thriller built around delay, uncertainty, and one man whose drift invites the Antonioni comparison to The Passenger.
Mike and Jose's distance from Bronte keeps the focus on how Wuthering Heights stages sex, power, role-playing, and consent.
Mike and Jose come at Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights without the usual burden of prior allegiance to Emily Bronte's novel, and that gives the episode a useful angle. Rather than grading the film as an adaptation, the conversation first asks what kind of film it is.
A Raimi discussion that lets cartoon gore open into a sharper argument about tone.
Send Help gives Eavesdropping at the Movies a tight frame for a bigger question: how far can a survival-horror thriller comedy stretch before its tonal control starts to wobble?
A skeptical, detail-minded conversation about Nuremberg and a historical drama whose seriousness strains its cinematic judgment.
Mike and Jose treat Nuremberg as a serious historical drama that gradually narrows into a courtroom film, while questioning whether that seriousness ever becomes persuasive cinema.
Mike and Jose weigh Amsterdam's political resonance against its uneven emotional pull.
Amsterdam lands here as a movie with political urgency that is easier to respect than to feel. Mike and Jose follow its concern for veterans left behind after war, its anxiety about populist agitation, and the way those ideas brush against January 6, but they keep returning to…
Mike and Jose test where The Menu's restaurant satire sharpens, and where its theory of art and status thins out.
Eavesdropping at the Movies approaches The Menu as a satire with a wobble at its center: it knows the restaurant is absurd, but seems less sure how seriously to take the chef's theory of art.
Three friends recap Daredevil, Fallout, and new releases scene by scene, in Spanish.
Slasher talk with sharp teeth.
Mike and Jose discuss the film Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, focusing on its unique style and Emma Stone's performance.
Mike and Jose review Ryan Coogler's horror film 'Sinners' about twin brothers opening a juke joint in 1932 Mississippi that gets attacked by vampires.
Mike and Jose review Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth film in the series, with Mike hating it for its sadistic nature.
Mike and Jose discuss their mixed feelings about Bradley Cooper's film 'Maestro', focusing on the challenges of actors directing themselves and the film's structural issues.
Mike and Jose discuss their experience watching The Zone of Interest at a press screening, praising the projection quality at Mockingbird Cinema and comparing it to Cineworld.
Mike and Jose review David O.
Mike and Jose review the film 'The Menu,' a black comedy about an exclusive restaurant where guests become the meal.
Mike and Oze review Jane Schoenbrunn's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a meta-slasher starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson about a fictional film franchise running since the 1980s.
Eavesdropping at the Movies reviews Sirat, Oliver Laxe’s desert film about a father searching for his daughter after a rave in Morocco.
Eavesdropping at the Movies reviews Cleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent, a Brazilian historical political thriller set in 1977 during the dictatorship and running close to 2 hours 40 minutes.
Mike and Jose review Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights (2026) as a film first, arguing that adaptation faithfulness should come after the question of whether it works on screen.
Eavesdropping at the Movies reviews Send Help, the Sam Raimi survival-horror thriller comedy written by Mark Swift and Damien Shannon.
Mike and Jose discuss the film Pillion, a romantic comedy-drama about a young gay man entering a BDSM relationship, with Mike sharing his emotional reaction.
Mike and Jose review James Vanderbilt’s "Nuremberg," a 2-hour-25-minute historical courtroom drama based on Jack L.